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FURTHER TOWARD MINOR LITERATURES

by

AARON HAMMES

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York

2021

ii

Copyright 2021

AARON HAMMES

All Rights Reserved

iii

Further Toward Minor Literatures

By

Aaron Hammes

This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

6/23/2021 Tanya Agathocleous Chair of Examining Committee 6/28/2021 Kandice Chuh Executive Officer

Supervisory Committee:

Tanya Agathocleous

Jonathan Gray

John Brenkman

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

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ABSTRACT

Further Toward Minor Literatures

By

Aaron Hammes

Advisor: Tanya Agathocleous

Further Toward Minor Literatures

Aaron Hammes

Minor literature is literatures of the minoritarian, not simply that produced by (cultural, ethnic, racial, gender-expressive, sexual, ability, age) minorities. Further Toward Minor Literatures operates from this decisive distinction to trace the contours and potentialities of one minoritarian literature, the contemporary transgender novel in the US and Canada. This study is premised in part on putting the fiction itself on a plane with theoretical and critical sources, creating a dialogue that does not privilege one discourse over the other. Minor literature is self-theorizing, perhaps even authotheoretical, in its expressing and fulfilling the mobile orientations of its minoritarian communities. This study does not attempt to build out the machinery of minor literature as explanatory or canonizing, but rather to test affinities between seemingly disparate literary works, as well as instigate the novel’s late-stage capacity as a minor form. The spark for this study was touched off by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). In this slim volume, the philosopher and the psychoanalyst introduce the characteristics and faculty of a minor literature, each playing a central role in Further Toward a Minor Literature: deterritorialization, political ubiquity, and collective value. However, one oddity of Deleuze and Guattari’s work is the singularity of its literary object, the corpus (and life) of a Czech writer who never completed a novel and published only a handful of (admittedly massively influential) stories in his truncated lifetime. If a theory of minor literature is to become a machine as dynamic and multifarious as the actual fiction it concerns, it ought to exercise its capacity to communitarian expression, rather than uphold the uniqueness of any one writer as representative. The introduction of Further Toward a Minor Literature is thus a quick succession of arguments: why this corner of Deleuze and Guattari’s expansive body of thought, why the novel as a form, what literary genres mean for this minor literature, what a trans-specific literary theory would or would not do, and how more recent formulations of autofiction and autotheory might apply to minor literature.

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Part I of Further Toward a Minor Literature proceeds to unpack each of the three concepts within the category of minor literature, but does so in terms of resistance and self-determination, rather than simply as unique aesthetic conditions. As such, the terms of this minor literature are defined in contradistinction to those embodied by the figure of the Master, the normativizing conglomerate of the social who operates through various phobic public spheres, enacting his dictates and strictures on all, but most pronouncedly minoritized, subjects. This study presents various means of remapping through the minoritarian, surveying the Master’s territories and the boundaries of the phobic public spheres, and considering strategies for carving out space for minoritarian selfrepresentations. This latter concept, borrowed in part from sociologist and filmmaker Nicola Mai, acknowledges the ways in which outward and inward representations fold into the self for minoritarian subjects, particularly in light of the excess of definition and censure from phobic publics. Minoritarian deterritorialization, then, is first presented through the example of Jose Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification, and the ways in which this minor literature thematizes disidentifying as both expression of selfrepresentation and naming the objects of resistance. Muñoz considered Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity as just such a disidentifying project, and it is presented here in terms of its applicability to long-form fiction. Patricia Hill Collins’ recent work on epistemic resistance is also read as an instance of deterritorializing knowledge production, using institutional logics against their own systemic exclusion and erasure of minoritarian subjects. The politics of this minor literature is largely read as gestural; the content of the novels is by and large not political in any overt sense, though the form and expression certainly are, when read through a minor literary lens. Finally, the communitarian value and revolutionary potential inherent in minor literature is considered specifically against how minoritarian subjects in these novels theorize solidarity and persistence. The applicative half of the study takes the components of minor literature and proposes three regions ripe for deterritorialization in trans minor literature. Part II considers time and history, observing the ways in which the novel’s durative capacities and responsibilities are largely frustrated by the minor literature at hand. The Master’s presumptions of development, linearity, and causality are mocked, subverted, or wholesale discarded by a collection of novels that is not prepossessed of its characters’ incremental growth. Similarly, Part III uses minor literature to challenge majoritarian assumptions regarding identity formation and the construction of passing. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophies of becoming are measured against Paul B. Preciado’s, culminating with theorizing minoritarian misreading, authenticity, masking, and (mis)recognition. Having demonstrated a range of experiments with and provocations of two of the grand engines of The Western Novel—time and identity—Further Towards Minor Literatures turns in Part IV to a seemingly narrower focus: labor, as read through sex work. These highly gendered, criminalized trades bring together and concretize some of the threads of Parts II and III, as minoritarian characters participate in and muse about the sex trades in manners quotidian or extreme, depending on who’s asking. Further Toward Minor Literatures concludes not with its own grand, deterritorializing gesture, but with a final case study: Torrey Peters’ almost shockingly successful Detransition, Baby.

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Though Peters is represented by other novellas in this study, her most recent novel is easily the bestselling work of long-form fiction by and about a trans person in the English literary tradition. Future prospects for minor literature are necessarily steeped in minoritarian horizons, dreaming and enacting futures unthinkable within the borders of the Master’s maps. Each of the novels in this study, as well as the vast majority of its critical sources, is in some way reflective of better worlds, ones not governed by heteronormativity, white supremacy, misogyny, and top-down class politics. Minor literature is a disidentificatory machine, but one that equally (mis)recognizes the territories in and against which it is written, constituting alternative vernaculars for encountering a willfully alienating world. Further Toward Minor Literatures is as such an aperture on alternative reading and critical practices, a counterdiscourse which challenges both the apologetics of neoliberal representation ethics and assumptive, positivistic epistemology.

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CONTENTS

Page

ABBREVIATED WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………………….…………….viii

INTRO………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..1

INTERLUDE……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….53

CHAPTER 1……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....65

CHAPTER 2…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…..87

CHAPTER 3………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….….104

CHAPTER 4………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….….129

CHAPTER 5………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….….182

CHAPTER 6……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..244

OUTRO…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..277

WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..311

viii

Abbreviated Works Cited:

The Criticism Deleuze, Gilles, et al. A Thousand Plateaus.(TP) Deleuze, Gilles, et al. Kafka: toward a Minor Literature. (TML) Edelman, Lee. No Future Queer Theory and the Death Drive. (NF) Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. (TB) Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. (QTP) Halberstam, Jack. Queer Art of Failure. (QF) Halberstam, J Jack. Female Masculinity. (FM) Halberstam, J Jack. Trans*: a Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. (T*) Muñoz Jose Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. (CU) Muñoz Jose Esteban. Disidentifications Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. (D) Preciado, Paul B., et al. An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing. (AU) Preciado, Paul B., et al. Countersexual Manifesto: Subverting Gender Identities. (CM) Valentine, David. Imagining Transgender: an Ethnography of a Category. (IT) The Fiction Binnie, Imogen. Nevada. (N) Fleischmann, T. Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through. (TT) Huxtable, Juliana. Mucus in My Pineal Gland.. (MPG) Lawlor, Andrea. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl: a Novel. (PMG) Peters, Torrey. Detransition, Baby. (DB) Peters, Torrey. Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones. (IYFL) Peters, Torrey. Masker. (M) Plante, Hazel Jane. Little Blue Encyclopedia: (for Vivian). (LBE) Plett, Casey Little Fish. (LF) Rosenberg, Jordy. Confessions of the Fox: a Novel. (CF) Sycamore, Mattilda Bernstein. Sketchtasy. (S) Thom, Kai Cheng. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: a Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous

Memoir. (FF) Whitehead, Joshua. Jonny Appleseed: a Novel. (JA)

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Intro:

The spark for this study was touched off by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka:

Toward a Minor Literature (1975), in which the authors seek to detail the forms and functions

of a literature which expresses the drive “to hate all the languages of the master” (26). Minor

literature is para-linguistic, tracing the points at which language ceases being representative to

move towards its literary extremes or perceived expressive limitations. Minor literature is

embodied and aspirational; what it moves toward in part is to “know how to create a

becoming-minor” (27), as individuals both creating and reflected within the literature are

always connected to larger communities. But Deleuze and Guattari have even more august

ambitions for minor literature, perhaps grander than have been accounted for in its wake. They

seek after, in the figure of Franz Kafka, but certainly reaching beyond as well, the position from

which “minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for

every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (18). These

revolutionary conditions are as much survival and resistance tactics as aesthetic precepts, and

gesture toward a station for literature which is inaccessible (which is not to preclude also being

illegible and undesirable) to the great and established. But in both their collaborative and

individual works, Deleuze and Guattari themselves labor in a great and established tradition of

Western philosophy. Thus it is worth rescuing from the parenthetical their query and

provisional rejoinder: “(Is there a hope for philosophy, which for a long time has been as

official, referential genre? Let us profit from this moment in which antiphilosophy is trying to

be a language of power)” (ibid).

2

In their slim volume, then, the philosopher and the psychoanalyst introduce three

characteristics and faculty of a minor literature, each of which plays a central role in Further

Toward a Minor Literature: deterritorialization, political ubiquity, and collective value.

Deterritorialization begins at the particularly fungible concept of territory, with its twinned

thematizations of borders/borderlessness and re/orientation within maps that can be

oppressive or liberatory depending on how they are encountered. For a literature to

territorialize, it stakes claims to specific structures of time, identity, and labor. Minor literature

does indeed operate from within territory, but it (de)constructs the aforementioned categories

according to logic and praxes of deterritorialization, wrenching phenomenological,

characterological, and materialist expression in fiction from master narratives designed to elide,

exclude, and punish.

These deterritorializations render both the content and expression of minor literature

politically charged and horizonal, even if that politics is neither unitary nor necessarily coherent

across works. The (anti)politics runs a course similar to how this study reads the “profits” of

Deleuze and Guattari’s antiphilosophy. Everything in minor literature is political in part due to

the “cramped space” (TML, 17) in which it is produced. Minoritarian subjects attempting to

participate in the grand and established literary traditions are placed under political lenses

which measure degrees of assimilation and, for lack of a better term, capitulation. A minor,

deterritorializing literature carves out and remaps politics through tactics of disidentification

and standpoint epistemology, itself an anti-epistemological orientation. Finally, the inbuilt

communitarian value of minor literature issues forth from an “active solidarity in spite of

skepticism” (ibid), skepticism from the Master as regards the validity and value of minoritarian

3

knowledge projects. Possible communities are all the markedly proposed and revolutionary

potentialities the more trenchantly enacted writing outside of one’s community. Disidentifying

with phobic politics, as minor literature does, inherently requires proposing different—some

nearer or further—horizons of communitarian political possibility. The three categories of this

study—time, identity and labor—read through a particular minor literature, each offers some

sense of what is or what could be to come.

Still, despite the emphasis on (anti-)politics and collective value, one oddity of Deleuze

and Guattari’s work is the singularity of its literary object: the corpus (and life) of a Czech writer

who never completed a novel and published only a handful of (admittedly massively influential)

stories in his truncated lifetime. If a theory of minor literature is to become a machine as

dynamic and multifarious as the actual fiction it concerns, it ought to exercise its capacity to

think in communitarian terms?, rather than uphold the uniqueness of any one writer as

representative. With this in mind, Further Toward a Minor Literature examines a range of

novels under the mantle of transgender minor literature which test and stresses each element

extracted from Deleuze and Guattari’s initial proposal, all against the presumption that minor

literature is self-theorizing and builds its own antiphilosophy through narrative content and

expression.

The current moment in literary history finds available a spectrum of trans novels which

uniquely balance formal experimentalism with self-conscious mutation or violation of grand

and accepted generic conventions—not least those of the arguable queen of forms of the

Western Novel, Bildungsroman. This trans lit is minor in that it acknowledges, and often

thematizes, majoritarian forms and deterritorializes them with uncanny consistency and

4

breadth. One can feel the friction between the road novels of Jack Kerouac or even Cormac

McCarthy’s loner treks through desert wasteland in Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, and minor

literature offers a vocabulary of disidentity and remapping for Maria Griffiths’ experiences as an

(anti-)heroine. Similarly, albeit in a wholly separate context, Roz Kaveney’s Annabelle in Tiny

Pieces of Skull: A Novel of Manners might have pinkies-up high tea at a literary salon during the

fin de siècle, wondering about women’s work and creative value as she might in the Wharton

novels she reads, but does something similar pondering the mundanities of sex work in queer

haunts in 1980s Chicago. It is thus the form of the novels which is politically charged, even as

the content is disidentifying and deterritorializing, aware of the major forms and tropes which it

references and refigures. Minor literature is a flexible codex which can track usages of the

time, characterization, and labor of these novels to delineate their communitarian value and

revolutionary political urgency. Deleuze and Guattari’s characteristics—deterritorialization, the

pervasion of politics, and communitarian value—are what minor literature is. Particular and

interconnected deterritorializations of and disidentifications with novelistic time, identity, and

labor are what trans minor literature does.

What this study defines as transgender minor literature is comprised of novels written

in English by trans-identifying authors about trans characters based in the United States and

Canada, chronologically spanning from Nevada (2013) to Torrey Peters’ Detransition Baby

(2021). In this simple sense, it is a literature in which its authors share one

experiential/identitarian characteristic with their primary (and, often, secondary) characters:

they have gender transitioned in some manner that distinguishes from or generally rejects their

binary sex-gender assigned at birth. This study’s aim is in a certain sense descriptive: in

5

examining a set of works which are chronologically proximal but generically and formally

diverse, minor literature acts as an explanatory and interrogative machinery to describe the

political stakes and communitarian value of a literature which is perhaps less of a community

than demanding one. Kafka himself is difficult to place in one particular enduring literary

community, and when he is situated in either vertical lineages (say, existentialist fiction) across

time, or horizontal ones (such as Milan Kundera’s concept of the Modern Central European

Novel), it is often in an affective gesture to find kinship or similarity, as if these associations

somehow better describe or define his work. Further Toward a Minor Literature attempts

almost the inverse of Deleuze and Guattari’s project in this respect, attempting as it does to

test communitarian resistance and (anti-)identity tactics across works. What defines these

novels as minoritarian is more than demographic similarities between authors or topical

overlaps within works; instead, the specific ways in which they deterritorialize the tropes,

motifs, forms, and mechanics of the novel according to communitarian self-definition and the

politics that emerges therefrom define them as unique in activating the revolutionary potential

of minor literature.

The novel is the ideal vehicle for minor literature both due to and despite its history.

The arguments contained in this study are not periodizing, and no lineage is sought which

results or terminates in trans minor literature; perhaps literary history itself is deterritorialized

through minor literature. What the novel offers in the here-and-now is a vehicle which on the

one hand carries with it certain generic expectations and assumptions, particularly when issuing

from minoritarian subject positions, and on the other is distinct from memoir or direct

6

confessional: the literary media most tolerated from the minoritarian.1 The trick of this study is

in part to measure up both formal and content-based deterritorializations, and put the fiction

itself on a plane with theoretical and critical sources, creating a dialogue that does not privilege

one discourse over the other. Western philosophical and literary critical traditions that are

recognized as such are necessarily major, and majoritarian literature does not need to self-

theorize to persist. Trans minor literature specifically emerges at a moment when “debates”2

go far beyond trans studies in any formal academic sense, and instead proceed from what trans

subjectivity and subjecthood are, and, precisely as brutalist and backwards as it sounds,

whether they ought to persist as distinct at all. Minor literature promises a means of

knowledge-building from the minoritarian, exemplified by? the novels in this study.3

The introduction of Further Toward a Minor Literature builds towards a trans minor

literature through a series of interlocking steps. First, a section on novel theory considers how

the category difference between memoir and novel is at a potential tipping point at this

moment in trans literature. Narratives of the marginalized or presumed subaltern are often

expected to be confessional and revelatory; minor literature is beholden to neither of these

conditions. I use influential theories of the novel’s particular ability to subvert and reconsider

1 A quick search (4/28/2021) of the best-sellers in Amazon.com’s “transgender” designation yields (in descending order): Lauren Hough’s Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing: essays; Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out; Pádraig Ó Tuama’s In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World; and Janet Mock’s blockbuster Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More. Each of these is memoir and personal reflection, with nary a novel in the top 25. On a similar search of the LGBT tag, Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby is the highest by a trans-identifying author, at #11. 2 Which I scare-quote, as such “thought experiments” tend to be one-sided and entirely punching down, rendering one’s subject position or (anti-)identity an object of question, necessitating defense. These would include bad faith discussions of trans as a category deserving equal protection under the law, trans participation in organized sports, nature v nurture mirroring sex v gender expression, and generally bad science, weak philosophy, and politicized senses of hetero/homonormative family which render self-determination “debatable.” 3 Which is to say, rejecting, resisting, reversing, and reterritorializing the abovementioned “debates.”

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subjectivity (via Bakhtin) and history (Lukács and Benjamin) to show what a trans minor

literature might be able to accomplish.

Second, the breadth of trans minor literature is demonstrated through a rendition of the

various generic classifications which these novels challenge, provisionally deploy, and

deterritorialize. This study relies upon a wide range of criticism and theory, and arguably a no

less wide range of fictive literature. This breadth is due in equal parts to the recency of the

literature and the nature of the attempt to define a new category of literature—the range offer

texture and depth to the three overarching heuristics taken from Deleuze and Guattari. For the

category to hold, a large number of texts need to be considered and put into conversation with

one another.

Third, minor literature is situated against some extant considerations of trans theory as

a field of inquiry. The deterritorializations of trans minor literature do not end at the literary

form under consideration, but instead propose trans-specific interventions into more

“academic” identitarian knowledge projects. For example, a project such a C Riley Snorton’s

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, ostensibly a corrective to the assumed

whiteness and relative recency of trans as an identification or coherent category uses the tools

of minor literature since it deterritorializes causal history, thereby offering categories of radical

disidentification for trans people of color, both historically and at present. A minoritarian

reading of Snorton’s monograph suggests that these deterritorializations are more than

alternative histories; they are revolutionary reading practices which root contemporary Black

queer, gender nonconforming, and trans communities in an intersectional struggle for self-

identification and -determination spanning generations. The work becomes open rebellion

8

against recency bias and phobic public claims that non-binarism and the very concept of trans

identity are trends to be washed away in history. In its persistent claim of political ubiquity,

minor literature offers a different metric for evaluating theory: harm reduction and comfort.

Rather than the metric of explanatory “rigor” or even “coherence” of theory, one chief

communitarian value of minor literature is to aspire to Riki Anne Wilchins’ desire for theory to

lessen harm. These are the real political stakes of minor literature: to excavate a theory of

harm-reduction which is not simply palliative and reformist, but deterritorializing and

abolitionist. Minor literature is not just a robust or good, but a useful category insofar as it

fulfills its brief to remap territories that have had no space for minoritarian subjects.

Finally, some particularly recent considerations of the coinfluence and overlap between

fiction and theory are considered under the guises of autofiction and autotheory. While only a

couple of the works under consideration in this study would be found on a (nonexistent)

bookstore shelf under either of those labels, the concepts are considered more capaciously, as

descriptive of the ways minoritarian works self-theorize and remap theoretical and fictional

territories without necessary recourse to extant categories of either. Autotheory and

autofiction carry with them certain presumptions of and potentials for what kinds of subjects

are permitted to theorize or fictionalize themselves, and in what ways. Neither is sufficient to

detail or define this minor literature, but affordances of each idea are useful in considering

recent attempts to consider how fiction theorizes, and how theory narrativizes.

The structure of the study is organized around two dialogical parts, the first building up

the critical apparatuses definitional and constitutive of minor literature, the second conversing

with them in three distinct but related areas of inquiry. The areas of Part I build upon one

9

another as drivers of the Western Novel, and particularly Bildungsroman: time, identity, and

labor. Each is described via an interlocking set of deterritorializations as theorized by the

novels themselves, offering radical interventions in the assumptions of phobic publics and

majoritarian literature alike. The outro section uses Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby as a

denouement, putting to work all of the machinery of minor literature, and considering what

prospects it suggests for further expansion of the designations of the minoritarian.

Part I of Further Toward a Minor Literature is divided into three chapters, each of which

unpacks the three concepts within D&G’s category of minor literature under the headings:

“deterritorialization,” “everything is political,” and “everything takes on a collective value.” The

terms of this minor literature are defined in contradistinction to those embodied by the figure

of the Master, my term for the normativizing conglomerate of the social who operates through

various phobic public spheres, enacting his dictates and strictures on all, but particularly

minoritized subjects. I present various means of remapping through the minoritarian, surveying

the Master’s territories and the boundaries of the phobic public spheres, and considering

strategies for carving out space for minoritarian selfrepresentations. The concept of

selfrepresentation, borrowed in part from sociologist and filmmaker Nicola Mai, acknowledges

the ways in which outward and inward representations fold into the self for minoritarian

subjects, particularly in light of the excess of definition and censure from phobic publics.

Minoritarian deterritorialization, then, is first presented in Chapter 1 through the

example of Jose Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification, and the ways in which minor literature

thematizes disidentifying both through expressions of selfrepresentation and by naming the

objects of resistance. Muñoz considered Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity as just such a

10

disidentifying project, and Halberstam’s study is presented here in terms of its applicability to

long-form fiction. Patricia Hill Collins’ recent work on epistemic resistance is also read as an

instance of deterritorializing knowledge production, using institutional logics against their own

systemic exclusion and erasure of minoritarian subjects.

In Chapter Two, the politics of this minor literature is largely read as gestural; the

content of the novels is by and large not political in any overt sense, though the form and

expression certainly are, when read through a minor literary lens. Politics operates from the

minoritarian standpoint from which the persistence of the categories into which one has been

placed are seemingly up for debate in the phobic public spheres. The politics of minor

literature are communitarian and horizonal, writing past the immediate future which can seem

so unlikely to be altogether different from the phobias of the present. They are

antirepresentational politics, as evidenced by the expression of minor literary preoccupations

with time, identity, and labor: each denoting a revaluation of sociopolitical and cultural values.

The pervasion of violence in and at the margins of this minor literature is read as a call-to-action

for a range of resistances, some disidentificatory, others simply dissident.

Finally, the communitarian value inherent in minor literature is read, in Chapter Three,

as expressions of revolutionary potential, in part through a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s

theorizing of becoming. This final chapter of Part I works through different sorts of minor

collectivities, considering the appropriateness of applying concepts of community to a

minoritized subject position that admits of a massive amount of diversity of experience and

self-determinative mobile orientations. Then, an equally varied range of conceptions of

collectivity (beginning with Deleuze and Guattari’s own “collective assemblages of

11

enunciation”), values (such as the prospects for minoritarian utopia), and theoretics (such as

David Valentine’s “transgender imaginary” or Muñoz’s concept of antirelationality) are read

through the novels themselves, yielding specific deterritorializations of communitarian

expression. Again, the collective value of this minor literature is not that any or all

characterizations, tropes, or narrative arcs are somehow generalizable across a minoritarian

subject position, but rather that deterritorialization is necessarily a collective gesture. It is

toward minoritarian communitarianism, irrespective of any specific community it may be of, or

the various phobic publics it may be against.

Part Two of the study takes the components of minor literature and proposes three

regions ripe for deterritorialization in trans minor literature. Time, identity, and labor are read

through deterritorialization, political ubiquity, and collective revolutionary potential, as a

means of defining a trans minor literature and illustrating its potentialities. It’s worth noting

that the three components of minor literature from the first half of the study are not meant to

“map onto” the three characteristic regions of novel form in trans minor literature from the

second half; instead, the representation of time, identity and labor in these texts each bears

elements of deterritorialization, revolutionary political potential, and communitarian value.

The time of the novel, Bildungsroman or not, is one of developmental chronology,

assuming causation, growth, and linearity. Trans minor literature deterritorializes this

chronormative time, thematizing different ways of measuring duration and importance, and

berthing narrative arcs not beholden to satisfying beginning-middle-end lives and stories.

Similarly, if the traditional novel is a vehicle of identity formation, trans minor literature is no

less concerned with ways to build character, but does so using anti-identitarian tropes. Labor is

12

the reality of capitalism at any stage, and its development from industrialism to the present

mirrors that of the novel as a form. Trans minor literature references, theorizes, and

thematizes sex work uncannily often, unless one recognizes the overrepresentation of

minoritarian subjects in criminalized labor and the repercussions this preponderance has for

majoritarian literary assumptions regarding waged labor.

To make its case, the range of fictive texts of this minor literature is read for its own

theory. Minoritarian standpoint (anti-)epistemology requires not simply subjects but objects;

these novels do not simply thematize minoritarian subject experiences (becoming minor, etc.)

and the embodiment thereof through its trans characters. In addition, it experiments with

different geometries of relation, considering both the Master territories and minor

deterritorializations; narrativizing phobic publics and resistance tactics; and tracing arcs of

experience and self-theorizing without ever recurring (in these works of minor literature, at

least) to confessional or memoirist stories of gender transition. No more than Kafka was bound

to narrativize the experience of Prague Jews is trans minor literature required to trace

foreordained narratives of transition in sequence: beginning-middle-end. Instead, it is loosed of

this obligation by beginning with characters at various intervals of becoming, freer to consider

their lives and worlds from the standpoint of already-(provisionally, varyingly)-became. This

approach categorically contradict the initial pact of Bildungsroman character development and

meta-philosophy, which uses development as its proving ground for political, philosophical, or

aesthetic conclusions. Further Toward a Minor Literature tracks a literary category that goes

much further, testing deterritorialization as a non-individualizing, non-exceptionalizing machine

that emphasizes communitarian politics of resistance and persistence.

13

Chapter Four considers time and history, observing the ways in which the novel’s

durative capacities and assumptive responsibilities are largely frustrated by trans minor

literature. The Master’s presumptions of development, linearity, and causality are mocked,

subverted, or discarded wholesale by a collection of novels that does not presuppose its

characters’ incremental growth. Minoritarian novels play against chrononormative

assumptions both of the trajectory of a life and how long-form fiction can or ought to convey it.

The unifying feature is a lack of responsibility (or even culpability) to offer prehistories or

aftermaths, rendering the time of minor literature a “slice” of varying depth or thickness,

complete with narrative elisions or intentional oversights. Of the fifteen novels referenced at

any length in this study, only two include direct narrativization of trans, nonbinary, or gender

nonconforming characters’ childhoods: the fantastical Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars,

which treats its narrator’s prehistory at best elliptically, and Confessions of the Fox, whose form

is such that it most directly adopts and distorts the historical development novel. It would be

fair to say that Tiny Pieces of Skull is the nearest to having an ending (but even there it is a

circular one, its protagonist having returned to London with a raft of experiences as a trans

woman in sex work, with particular future prospects neither desired nor implied).

Chapter Five uses minor literature to challenge majoritarian assumptions regarding

identity formation and passing, where passing is theorized as a set of switches and triggers

predicated on hermeneutic readings between minoritarian and majority subjects. The novel,

even the minor novel, is the literary medium of construction and constructedness, particularly

when it comes to identity and character development. As noted in Chapter Four, this minor

literature begins from a baseline of character development which entails certain degrees of

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choice regarding sex-gender expression and embodiment. As such, passing becomes a primary

identitarian point of contact between phobic publics and minoritarian subjects. In Nevada, for

example, Maria Griffiths offers soliloquized instructions on facial maintenance routines for

passing (at which she is nearly every instance successful); in Detransition, Baby, Reese forgoes

her tuck at the queer section of Riis Beach to “pass” as trans; and in Sketchtasy, Alexa dolls

herself up to pass as sex working Tyler before hitting the strolls. In Chapter Five, the distinction

between minority and minoritarian becomes especially palpable: the Master hails the minority

to pass whenever possible, and to measure themselves against majoritarian metrics of success,

happiness, and identity. (Mis)recognition is the ultimate mantle for subterfuge, abstention, and

positive identification alike; minor literature deterritorializes and renders communitarian how

and to what extent minoritarian subjects (mis)recognize each other and the territories they

remap. The Masker is instructive in this kind of (mis)recognition, wherein the triangle of Krys, a

younger trans woman, Sandy, a trans elder, and Felix, the fetishistic masker push and pull

between erotic mind games and communitarian responsibility. Sandy is humiliated and

outraged by cis-man Felix’s presence and Krys’s ultimate attraction to him, Krys disidentifies

with Sandy’s unitary conception of trans womanhood, lesbian community, and family, and Felix

is equally disgusted by and attracted to trans women. His is a failure or unwillingness to

recognize this tension, whereas Krys and Sandy (mis)recognize the subject position of the other,

including their hopes, needs, and potential futures—i.e. the material of novels.

Having demonstrated a range of experiments with and provocations of two of the great

engines of The Western Novel—time and identity—Further Towards Minor Literatures turns in

Chapter 6 to a third: labor, as read through sex work. The grand and established traditions of

15

the novel track changes over causal, ultimately linear time—the historical novel expands or

contracts around seminal moments, the domestic novel marks its hours against the bourgeois

quotidian. Sex work has experienced intervals and locales during and in which it was more or

less valued, criminalized, or regulated, but it has always loomed as labor for those willing,

desirous of, or forced to engage in non-sanctioned, non-procreative, and/or queer sex. The

highly gendered, criminalized sex trades bring together and concretize some of the threads of

Chapters Four and Five, as minoritarian characters participate in and muse about sex work in

manners quotidian or extreme, from Little Fish’s Wendy confidently navigating this income

source under Canadian quasi-legalization to Tiny Pieces of Skull’s Anabelle accepting latent

violence as an element of the work which provides both community and survival. Sex work

takes on a variety of guises and significations in each novel, each defined in some way by

stigmatization and criminalization from without, and survival and communitarian self-

protection from within.

Further Toward Minor Literatures concludes with a final case study: Torrey Peters’

commercial and critical success, Detransition, Baby. Though Peters is represented by other

novellas in this study, her most recent novel is easily the bestselling work of long-form fiction by

and about a trans person in the English language. Detransition, Baby, as its title suggests,

concerns a specific kind of (un)becoming, complete with one of the great

hetero/homonormative markers of time and identity, the birth of a child. But beyond its

unique status as a third work of long-form fiction by its author (rather than first, as is the case

with each of the other novels in this study), Detransition, Baby is a signal moment for this

theory of minor literature in that it complicates and reinforces the concepts of each part of the

16

study. While the novel remains a “slice of time” in a manner not dissimilar to the other novels,

it is arguably a fatter slice, making reference to prehistories of gender transition with which the

other novels largely do not concern themselves. Furthermore, the kind of family novel it

deterritorializes is predicated upon the birth of a baby and a family structure which is centered

around how best to parent—certainly a foreign clime in trans minor literature. As regards

identity, Peters’ novel has a braided structure, following (dis)identifications and

(mis)recognitions of a cis woman struggling with queerness, a trans woman grappling with the

possibility of motherhood, and a detransitioned man navigating his own subject position in

relationships with each, as well as his relatively recent past. Finally, sex work is at once

marginal (not in the sense of less important, more in the spatial inflection of looming in the

margins) and centrally valuable in thinking through emotional labor and surrogacy in the

novel’s proposal of an alternative parental/familial structure.

Future prospects for minor literature are necessarily steeped in minoritarian horizons,

dreaming and enacting futures unthinkable within the borders of the Master’s maps. Each of

the novels in this study, as well as the vast majority of its critical sources, is in some way

reflective of better worlds, ones not governed by heteronormativity, white supremacy,

misogyny, and top-down class politics. Minor literature is a disidentificatory machine, but one

that equally (mis)recognizes the territories in and against which it is written, constituting

alternative vernaculars for encountering a willfully alienating world. Further Toward Minor

Literatures is as such an aperture on alternative reading and critical practices, a

counterdiscourse which challenges both the apologetics of neoliberal representation ethics and

the Master’s monopolizing, conscribing, self-reinforcing epistemology.

17

Before diving into the breach of minor literature, a word on rhetoric and method:

Further Toward Minor Literatures works from presumptions of the dialogic. These

presumptions are derived directly from communitarian self-determination and value, a

remapping that does not hinge on distinctions between philosophy and narrative, criticism and

novels. This begins with Deleuze and Guattari, certainly, but quickly involves other theoretical

and critical voices, some more pronounced, some more textural and background. Almost

immediately, the fiction is itself added into the conversation, which can produce a sometimes-

dizzying array of effects, reading citations and ideas from theorists, novelists, and characters

themselves.

A minor study ought to hold to its own minoritarian dictates, rather than bifurcating

theoretical lenses and applications. This particular study is predicated on minor literature as a

force for self-theorization, and thus my role is in no small part to line up the elements and set

the gear in motion. My own participation in the dialogue is perhaps more conductor than

soloist, the result being a great deal of close reading and measuring up. Part of a

communitarian analysis is attempting to replicate not a chorus but an interwoven set of

contrapuntal readings which suggest both the topographies and topologies of the (re)mapped

territory of minor literature.

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Why/Not the (Trans) Novel

Further Toward a Minor Literature started out as a different sort of comparative project,

one which examined three different minor literatures. Deleuze and Guattari’s book leaves its

titular figure, Franz Kafka, adrift in his own time and place, suggesting the singularity of his

literary output. But their passing reference to “blacks in America,” noted as an instance of a

minoritarian group with its own vernacular, operating within an English language which they

made their own, suggests a more communitarian potential for some of their minor literature

machinery. As a remedy for their singularizing framework, I planned to have a chapter on 20th

century African American novels, focusing on “single novel” authors, including Gwendolyn

Brooks, James Weldon Johnson, Frank Brown, and Alice Childress. The political construction of

a Black Belt identity is bolstered by W.E.B. DuBois’s proposal to the United Nations that African

American communities constituted an oppressed nation within American borders at mid-20th

century. Minor literature in this iteration becomes a resistance effort for people facing open

hostility and erasure a century after their formal, legal bondage and status as chattel is

abolished.

Kafka himself could be put into a few different “literatures of small peoples”; Milan

Kundera’s proposal for a constellation of “Modern Central European novelists”4 is a possible

minor literature I contemplated writing about; another is that of the Scandinavian writers with

whom Kafka identified himself in his diaries and letters.5 Kafka’s work could also be aligned with

the explosion of contemporary early Soviet writers, whose black humor towards political

4 Including Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Jarsolav Hasek, and Witold Gombrowicz, all hailing from East of Germany, West of Russia. 5 He writes most glowingly of kinships with Soren Kierkegaard, August Strindberg, and Knut Hamsun.

19

turmoil and deterritorialization of tropes of the “Russian spirit” of the previous century put

them outside the “great and established” tradition of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Chekhov.6 This

constellation is at once no less loose than the Black Belt literature suggested above, but at the

same time bolsters the case against Deleuze and Guattari’s initial construct as simply explicative

of one writer’s singular genius. Here minor literature becomes a mode of disidentification from

a political reality which resulted in its luminary figures dying in prison from starvation (Kharms);

repeatedly denied bids to expatriate (Bulgakov); or whose work became sufficiently popular as

to force the Stalinist government to established satire as a Soviet value to explain uncensoring

their novels (Ilf and Petrov).

But the category which comprises this study, American and Canadian trans literature of

the last decade, was sufficiently capacious, prescient, and, for want of a better phrase, actively

and currently deterritorializing that it easily fills a monograph on minor literature. The debut

novels of this study speak to one another both figuratively and literally (many of the authors

discussed here blurb each other’s books and thank each other, suggesting a network of support

and influence). More importantly, as I will argue, trans minor literature is unique in the ways in

which it deterritorializes, expresses its politics, and revaluates communitarian self-definition. It

also deterritorializes theories of the novel in particular ways, both participating in and

disidentifying with persistent and influential theories of long form fiction. Trans minor

literature revaluates the primacy of chrononormativity as an engine of the novel, troubles the

extent to which identity-formation is the only or primary mode of self-determination, and levels

6 These would include Mikhail Bulgakov, Ilf and Petrov, Venedikt Erofeev, Yury Olesha, and Daniil Kharms, among others.

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the scale of what is “good” work, or if work is good at all. In so doing, the novelistic form

becomes a revolutionary political device, deterritorializing its own history and lineage to

communitarian effect.

Trans Minor Literature and Theories of the Novel

Marthe Robert, in her Origins of the Novel, attempts to cite the unique station of the

novel in a paraphrase of Virginia Woolf: “the novel is the only form of art which tries to make us

believe that it gives a complete and truthful account of a real person’s life” (65). The firmly

restrictive “only” segregates memoir—lest one fails to assess memoir as a form of art—from

the capacities of the novel, but the attenuation of this ability of the novel is even more

interesting. There may in fact be other forms of art which do give complete and truthful

accounts of “real” people’s lives, but the novel is the only one which tries to make us believe it.

This minor literature, though, surely makes no such claim.

The novel offers minor literature a container in which to situate minoritarian subjects

uniquely; what does minor literature offer the novel? Jonathan Culler, in an essay appearing in

a volume attempting to account for the status of experimental fiction in the 1970s, solicits a

theoretic which can account for the potential illegibility of fiction: “What one requires is a

theory which distinguishes between the readable and the unreadable and assigns an important

place to, and explains the significance of, these works which resist our reading” (Surfiction, 256,

author’s emphases). With apologies to Culler, what follows is a radical reconsideration of

un/readable here, as surfiction is not itself a particularly capacious category for this study, and

perhaps enough ink has been spilled on Finnegan’s Wake and Beckett at this point in the

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history of criticism. If Culler’s call is for a theory which names the readable and unreadable

subject, and further seeks after a heuristic which attempts to describe the latter, it edges closer

to minor literature. Minoritarian subjects may (mis)behave in direct violation of assumptions

and the Master’s dictates, or ignorance thereof, but minor literature always carries with it the

threat of unreadability; it protects its subjects even when subjecting them to anguish and the

harms of their resistance. This is not just about the capacity of the novel, it is equally about the

genres it embodies, about which Culler adds: “if the essential function of genre is maintained,

radical changes of convention can take place within it without its texts becoming unreadable”

(ibid, 257, author’s emphasis). Culler clearly thinks that the essential function of genre—a

function subject to debate—is in fact maintained, and thus texts can themselves resist

unreadability. Genre can scaffold meaning in such a way that even departures within allow it to

be read, but this says nothing about who is “read” within the pages, and how. There is, in fact,

no Finnegan’s Wake among this, or perhaps any, minor literature—Joyce’s monolith requires

canon to arouse the enduring excitement it has, at least in the ways Culler details. But the

point is that there may not be radical changes in the convention(s) of genre(s) per se, but rather

in the constitution and formation of subjecthood and narrative time. Culler offers a note

towards the end of the essay that may render the extrapolation to minor literature less far

afield as he thinks about what literature can or ought to do: “The essence of literature is not

representation”—a notion commensurate with minoritarian analysis—“not a communicative

transparency”—this seems more subjective, but makes enough sense as regards

unreadability—“but an opacity, a resistance to recuperation which exercises sensibility and

intelligence” (ibid, 258). “An” opacity, indeed; to resist recuperation suggests that, in the eyes

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of some observer, at least, recuperation is necessary. There is some defamation, deformation,

some need for convalescence and recouping a loss. There needs be restoration. The means of

this resistance could be many, and more than a few in particular are built out in the study that

follows.

But the concept of minor literature began as a way to account for elements—style,

theme, motif, narrative, and, critically, language—of Franz Kafka’s fiction in its relationship to

the “major” German literary tradition. Minor literature operating within/on/against the North

American novel is waging a different sort of gambit. When Deleuze and Guattari make their

offhand reference to the minoritarian potential of “blacks in America,” they recognize in some

passing manner the different ways in which demographics construct community in a nation

built on chattel slavery. Part of this plays out in what the novel is about, in multiple senses of

the word: the subject matter, what it can or wants to do, who it concerns and is around, its

milieu. Mikhail Bakhtin takes these concerns to the level of language and traces a path

outwards in his Dialogic Imagination which can be followed towards further points of

intervention for minor literary theory. Bakhtin writes of a concept of “literariness” of language

which works “to preserve the socially sealed-off quality of a privileged community” or “to

preserve local interests at a national level” (382). Beginning with the latter function: local

interests can just as soon be communitarian as rooted in geographic locale. Minor literature

may, for Deleuze and Guattari, have been located in the literary work of “small peoples” (i.e.

outside of German, French, Italian, English, or, arguably, Russian literary traditions), but they

recognize the possibility of diasporic Black experience in the United States, and so offer an

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opening to extend the idea to other “local interests.”7 The first function of literariness, though,

carries a different inflection. Who is privileged, and from whom are they sealed-off? Is

literariness of a piece with Culler’s unreadability, or is it taxonomically distinct? Minor

literature has its own literariness, and while this literariness may serve to preserve a socially

sealed-off quality, it also speaks to the permeability of other social spheres. The privilege here

is one of insight, access, and experience, nothing more or less. But literariness is not a

monolith, and it is central to Bakhtin’s sense of the novel’s “imagination” that there is no

unitary language in a/the novel (ibid, 416). Instead, consider the dynamics of Bakhtin’s sense of

canonization—movements of language into/out of the novel by and through era—and re-

accentuation—the “feel” a reader has for the distance of literary language. The movements of

language in minor literature are those of deterritorialization, using the fungibility of the novel

to complicate canon and what is valued in both the novel and the subjects within. But this

“feel” of Bakhtin’s is another matter, as each literary age “re-accentuates in its own way the

works of its most immediate past,” pressured or obligated to overcome the distancing and

make something its own. It is worth questioning if minoritarian subjects experience this

pressure the same way, or if their deterritorializing art interacts with canonization apart from

their majoritarian (non)counterparts. Bakhtin explains further that re-accentuation is

conditioned by “a change in the background animating dialogue, that is, changes in the

composition of heteroglossia” (ibid, 420). One could read this claim simply to mean that art

reflects life, literary language is refracted through the vernaculars of the day, from slang to

7 Certainly one could consider Milan Kundera’s alternate (anti-)canon in his Art of the Novel as a similar gesture—the Modern Central European Novel is decisive in its minoritarian-ness for a Francophone Czech writer of fiction.

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ideology, but there is something more radical to be found in it. The polyvocality of the novel is

one of its defining characteristics for Bakhtin, and here he suggests a heteroglossia akin to an

ever-changing formula or compound, shifting composition according to an anterior dialogue

which animates it. Minor literature is radically adept at theorizing this dialogue, which is

measurable according to the degree to which it concerns or ignores minoritarian subject

positions. Paul B Preciado frames a similar concept, calling back to his reframing of Spivak’s

enduring construction of minoritarian vocality: “For the subaltern, speaking implies not simply

resisting the violence of the hegemonic performative, but above all imagining dissident theaters

where the production of a different performative force can be possible” (AU, 90). Animating

dialogues can be hegemonic violence from without, or imagining dissident theaters from within

minoritarian subject positions and communities. For Preciado, in language very similar to that

of Jose Esteban Muñoz from later in this study, this subaltern speaking culminates in

“disidentifying oneself in order to reconstruct the subjectivity damaged by the dominant

performative language” (ibid). Bakhtin’s was not necessarily a “performative” language, but his

reading of the novel’s polyvocal capacities is predicated on the construction of subjectivities.

When Preciado adds the prefix “re-”, it suggests the cyclicality of minoritarian self-preservation:

construction, deconstruction/destruction, reconstruction. When this study investigates time,

identity, and labor, it is always in terms of how the minor literature writes against (not strictly in

the sense of open resistance, but also as in “against the backdrop of”) animating dialogues from

without, what I’ll refer to as the Master’s dictates and decrees.

Relatedly, one can extrapolate how a phobic animating dialogue relates to Bakhtin’s

distinction between the authoritative word and internally persuasive discourse in constructing

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the language of the novel (ibid, 342). These two discourses are one valence beyond the

polyglossia Bakhtin sees as definitive for the novel, as they can emerge in different

configurations from different kinds of subjects. The decisive distinction is that the authoritative

word “does not know” internal persuasiveness, while internally persuasive discourse is “denied

all privilege” (ibid). Bakhtin sets up a categorical difference which is dichotomous, not

dialectical, a seemingly vast canyon between the two discourses. The authoritative is unaware

of the internally persuasive, in part because it thinks it has no use for it. The Master’s decree

may be more lasting or efficacious were it internally persuasive, but it hardly needs to be to

accomplish its ends. More interesting is that the internally persuasive seems somehow limited

in its internality, it remains internally persuasive perhaps in part due to its lack of privilege.

Now, “privilege to what” remains in question, and what minor literature can do with these

categories is worth examining further, but Bakhtin provokes us with a traversing of the canyon

before he dives into greater detail on either category. He suggests that the authoritative and

internally persuasive “may be united in a single word” but “more frequently […] an individual’s

becoming, an ideological process is characterized by a sharp gap between the two categories”

(ibid). The attractiveness of cognates such as sex-gender and selfrepresentation is in no small

part their potential to explore this unification. (Mis)recognizing oneself under the rubrics of the

phobic public spheres is one of the chief functions of deterritorialization—it requires an

authoritative mode of recognition or even representation, and then an internally persuasive

discourse around reversing/deforming/fucking8 the initial word. Preciado is more sympathetic

to a “crossing” which provides the minoritarian subject a different, internalized polyglossia

8 In the sense of “genderfuck”; see below.

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which might allow modulating between the authoritative and internally persuasive. He writes,

“the division of the author into a multiplicity of voices that undergo a crossing—a phenomena

that exists in any written work, but that is usually erased under the unicity of the author’s

name” (AU, 32). This crossing is a rather literal metaphor for deterritorialization; the word can

be bent and made to mutate and conform to the multiplicity that persists in minor literature.

The author’s name is neither unified nor an erasure, it acknowledges phobic animating

dialogues and appropriates the word for its own, communitarian, revolutionary purposes. On

then, to that word, and a meditation on from whence its authority derives.

The authoritative word demands acknowledgment, a definition of authority based on

recognition and response, each of which falls into the Master’s purview. Bakhtin suggests that

this word binds us to “a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher” (ibid), an elegant

formulation of feeling the distance from and proximity to a past that may not be “ours,” even

as it towers over us. Minor literature has very little concern with a megalithic past, gesturing to

it more by its absence than direct reference. For the minoritarian subject, this past is generally

either when they did not exist as a subject at all (Feinberg combats the authority of this

discourse throughout Transgender Warriors) or were more narrowly subject-ified than in the

present.9 Furthermore, the authoritative does not merge with other types of discourse; indeed,

it is always either acquiesced to or reacted against. In being acknowledged, it is impossible to

have a passive relationship to the authoritative as a minoritarian subject or community. And

yet, Bakhtin notes that the authoritative word is often “spoken by another in a foreign

9 Histories such as Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock’s Queer (In)justice and Dean Spade’s Normal Life do important work in demonstrating how the discourse of queer criminality is built out of narrow conceptions and then extends its tendrils into unlikely and surprising manifestations in the criminal legal system.

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language” (ibid, n343), which hews closer to the Deleuze and Guattari conception of language,

rather than Bakhtin’s voice/vocality. For minor literature, this suggests that the authoritative

can become the internally persuasive when uttered by the minoritarian subject. This reading is

based in part on Bakhtin’s suggestion that the authoritative permits no play with context,

perhaps because it is its own context. If there is no potential variance in context, than

decontextualization may be the only alternative. When deprived of its authority, this word

becomes simply a relic (ibid, 344, author’s emphasis), a term reminiscent of Paul B Preciado’s

“dildonics,” which makes a similar relic of the authority of the phallus10. But the mechanism for

depriving the authoritative word of its authority is left somewhat mysterious or even absented:

Bakhtin writes that the authoritative word cannot be represented in prose, only “transmitted”

(ibid). What does this distinction entail? The contexts for transmission have expanded beyond

Bakhtin’s Imagination in the generations since he laid down these concepts; (almost) as soon as

a word is thought it can be transmitted. If anything, the novel is a glacial means of

transmission, favoring representation wholly. Can a word be transmitted rather than

represented in fiction? Even in this technological era, Bakhtin would suggest not, proposing

that the authoritative word plays an “insignificant” role in the novel. The lingering question will

be if that is equally so in minor literature, in the novels of this study.

Internally persuasive discourse does not possess the authority of acknowledgment, it is

instead “affirmed through assimilation” (ibid, 345). As regards minor literature’s impetus for

communitarian value, this assimilation can be read at both the micro/individual level and the

macro/community, perhaps even favoring the latter. Whereas assimilation could be seen as a

10 Dildonics is explored at some length in Chapter 6 of the present study.

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one-way valve or conduit, however, internally persuasive discourse is always “half-ours and

half-someone else’s” (ibid). It is internally persuasive, not, perhaps, internally persuading; it

must originate from without. The decisive contrast for (minor) literature, though, is that

whereas the authoritative cannot be represented, internally persuasive is entirely the stuff of

novels: Bakhtin writes that with “a few changes in orientation,” the internally persuasive “easily

becomes an object of representation” (ibid, 347). This designation of being re-orientate-able is

clearly meant to exclude the authoritative, but one wonders if minor literature’s

deterritorializing machines might be able to reorient the authoritative through the internally

persuasive. Bakhtin has more to say about the mechanics of its deployment in prose when he

notes that “certain kinds of internally persuasive discourse can be fundamentally and

organically fused with the image of a speaking person” (ibid). Minor literature (or any fiction)

represents a spectrum of speaking persons, certainly, but their images may be another matter;

so much of minoritarian (non)identity boils down to the internally persuasive as measured

against the authoritative. The authoritative Master’s discourse, though, is never really fused

with a person even if it is occasionally transmitted through them.11 Vitally, the process of

“experimenting by turning persuasive discourse into speaking persons becomes especially

important in those cases where a struggle against such images has already begun”—which

might be to say, any images—“where someone is striving to liberate [themselves] from the

influence of such an image and its discourse by means of objectification, or is striving to expose

the limitations of both image and discourse” (ibid, 348). The image is the oppressor, minor

11 See Maria Griffiths’ boss in Nevada, the narrator of Little Blue Encyclopedia’s brother, or the specter of the police in Confession of the Fox, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, and others.

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literature shows paths of resistance and secession for the minoritarian subject, and the

revolutionary potential of this literature is its striving to liberate. Read liberate here in multiple,

concurrent senses: free from the oppression of the image, free not to acknowledge (or to

intentionally (mis)recognize) the authoritative word, free even to do what one will with

internally persuasive discourse. “Objectification” could just as soon be self-objectifying as

denuding the figurative power of the image as an object, to render it solid so that it can be

discarded or moved past. Any novel might have the capacity to expose limitations, but

majoritarian fiction is that which reveals such limitations simply as boundaries from within,

pressing forward the “evolution” of literature and its ability to reflect, refract, or escape its

time. Minor literature offers image and discourse, even without comment, in such a way that

each is deterritorialized from the background dialogue, and reimplemented according to

minoritarian subjects. Bakhtin cites the “enormous importance” of “struggling with another’s

discourse” (ibid), which is the unique mantle of minor literature: not writing simply against the

Grand Tradition, but carving out a language within it.

Bakhtin describes the movement of canonization through a “national language,” which

takes on a different shape when considered against minoritarian language and minor literature.

It is a matter of the extent to which the novel is a representation of linguistic change: the

“processes of shift and renewal of the national language that are reflected by the novel do not

bear an abstract linguistic character in the novel: they are inseparable from social and

ideological struggle, from process of evolution and of the renewal of society and the folk” (ibid,

68, author’s emphases). This assessment initially feels at cross-purposes as regards minor

literature. There is no question minor literature as much as major reflects shifting “national”

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language, both in the sense of the language of The American (or Canadian) Novel, and the

minor language(s) this literature carves out. Further, minor literature as a

process/tool/movement of social and ideological struggle is definitionally accurate: at its

seemingly most passive, it is perhaps its most effective at deforming and revaluating the

borders of the phobic public spheres. But “evolution” suggests a progressivist narrative that

does not obtain with minoritarian subjects, and renewing society and/or folk feels like a task for

nostalgia or Master-endorsed social memory (each of which will be later addressed). And yet,

even as minor literature can act as proof of struggle against such memory, it can also engage in

its own mythologization, be it for the future12 or for the past.13 Bakhtin seems aware of the

implanted assumptions regarding national language, and the ways in which the novel can

“speak another’s language.” “Under conditions of an active polyglossia,” he writes, “two myths

persist simultaneously: the myth of a language that presumes to be the only language, and the

myth of a language that presumes to be completely unified” (ibid, 69). These myths are worthy

of remark precisely due to the active polyglossia, which would seem to disavow any unitary or

exclusive language. But then, there is/are the background animating discourse(s), and in the

case of minor literature particularly, these myths operate behind, between, and above

minoritarian subjects and their use of language. Codes are switched, terms are troubled, and,

indeed, the Master is struggled with. But mine is not a linguistic analysis, and in some ways,

form (as in, the architecture of the words and the ways in which they fit together) is valuable

only in its unique purchase on content. To this end, a final contribution from Lukács’s Historical

12 See JK Jarboe’s Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel or Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts. 13 See MZ McDonnell’s Sinnach the Seer, or, for that matter, Confessions of the Fox.

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Novel, a study which interrogates character and the relationship of the one to the many in

historical fiction. Regardless of whether all minor literature or none is historical fiction

according to his definition, the fitness of Lukács’s concepts for minor literature is a further sign

of the de/re-formation of canon and category.

In a turn ringing of Deleuze of Guattari, Lukács notes that the novel “appears as

something in the process of becoming” (Historical Novel, 72-73), and thus is “the most

hazardous genre, and why it has been described as only half an art by many who equate having

a problematic with being problematic” (author’s emphases). This is as fruitful a way to measure

the political faculty of fiction as any: what does it do with its problematic. Whether the “half an

art” issue remains in play is debatable, but the hazards of becoming are precisely the raw

materials of minor literature; one could become a variety of things: a person, a subject, an

individual, or, following Monique Witting-via-Simone de Beauvoir, a woman (“One is Not Born a

Woman,” 5). Perhaps following Lukács’s own formulation, the novel could be in the process of

becoming a problematic or just becoming problematic as well. But the “hazards” of minor

literature are problematizing becoming, thinking through agency, asking who’s becoming and

whose becoming.

A fundamental tension in Lukács is between the necessarily social element of the novel

and its individual actors: one could argue minor literature’s communitarian impulse sits

somewhere between. Lukács proclaims “society is the principal subject of the novel” (Historical

Novel, 139), and that “the essential aim of the novel is the representation of the way society

moves” (ibid, 144). Minor literature somewhat inverts the perspective on this representation,

though—not just the subaltern attempting to speak, but the simultaneously embedded and

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subjugated ducking, covering, or parrying the phobic public’s ever-changing whims. No one

confuses minor literature for Waverly or Trollope, but it does necessarily operate on and

through the social—it must remap the territory to deterritorialize. Detransition, Baby, for

instance, examines the movement of its societies through the highly constrained activities of its

characters: Katrina and Ames in the foibles of interoffice romance, Amy and Reese in queer

relationships with each other and the trans community around them, Reese and Katrina in the

society of women of a certain social status. But more specifically, writes Lukács, the novel

“gives us not the concentrated essence of some particular trend” in society, “but, on the

contrary, the way in which the trend arises, dies away, etc.” (ibid, 140). Is a phobia a trend?

What about a strategy, a tactic, a method for encountering the social and one’s place in or

outside of it? Lukács may mean an aesthetic trend just as soon as a social one, but the latter

seems more in line with his engine for the historical novel: “tragic collision” (ibid, 142). This

collision is “a necessary form of social life,” but “only under very definite conditions and

circumstances”; there are two respects in which such social conflicts “achieve no clear and

definite resolution, either in the lives of individuals or in society as a whole” (ibid). The dynamic

of examining such a contemporary body of literature as that of this study is such that it knows

“society as a whole” has not and may not be working toward any such definite resolution. The

interesting corollary for any minor literature is whether minoritarian subjects seek out definite

resolution, or whether tragic collision can be a productive force for self-identification and

persistence. Lukács’s two respects –in which contradictions are either sufficiently leveled or

else simply fail to rise to the level of tragedy—only serve to add depth and texture to this

query. First, “there are definite phases in the growth of society where the mutual blunting of

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contradictions is the typical form in which social antagonisms are decided.” For minor

literature, though, the thrust is never that the minoritarian subject or community holds one set

of ideas and that the majoritarian holds another, contradictory and corresponding set. Instead,

it is the Master’s own contradictions, and those which animate the need for minoritarian

selfrepresentation and shifting biographical borders, which drive the narrative. Any blunting

would be partisan and representative not so much of accord for the sake of “growth,” but born

of self-interest and preservation. The second respect of no resolution is “even in periods which

antagonisms are at their sharpest”—and for the minoritarian, sharpness might be measured

not so much by period as by degree of manufactured vulnerability—“not all conflicts acquire

that final edge which leads on to the tragic.” Indeed, tragedy here may be in the eye of the

beholder, but “edge” is a trope throughout this minor literary investigation. The edge of the

parenthetical which holds together (mis)recognition, the hyphenate of sex-gender, the missing

dash of selfrepresentation, even the curvature of the phobic public spheres—these are neither

to be blunted nor need they be tragic for minor literature to deterritorialize, (de)politicize, or

enact its communitarian aims.

Lukács may himself sharpen this edge as he further details the novel’s (or The Novel’s,

more precisely) subject matter. He suggests that in the novel, “the characters should be

neutral or indifferent towards the central questions” (ibid, 141) though one then wonders what

exactly renders these questions central. In the case of trans minor literature, the questions

which phobic publics would imagine as central—gender expression or dysphoria, survival in a

phobic world—are often simply not so. Is the central question of Confessions of the Fox Jack

and Bess’s romance, or the mysterious appearance of merchant ships in the harbor? The

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characters are indifferent towards neither of these. But Lukács goes on, “since the subject of

the novel is the total span of social life”—a claim for the Grand Tradition if ever there was

one—“a fully carried-through collision can only be a marginal case existing alongside many

others” (ibid, 142). In one sense, if the first part of this proposition is given, perhaps the second

is difficult to dispute; the total span of social life would indeed seem to level the importance or

notability of any one “case,” tragically colliding or not. But is this equally the case for a subject

or, and the aptness of the term is debatable14, protagonist who is themselves marginal to begin

with? Can indifference or abstention be an engine for fiction? Lukács’s historical novel

portrays “what happens before and after” great historical explosions and crises (ibid, 150), but

these are the tragic collisions of the majoritarian—the collisions of the minoritarian subject

register on a different meter. Though it may be that “the novel counters the general

historicism of the essence of a collision with the concrete historicism of all the details” (ibid,

151), historicism is far from an empirical category in minor literature. Narrating minoritarian

community can dictate an alternative set of collisions from those of any “general historicism,”

and calls into question the necessity of any historicism for the novel.

Mario Ortiz Robles notes just such a questioning in the preface to his The Novel as

Event. His book is motivated in part by the dawning reality that the academic field of cultural

studies “has placed an interpretive onus on the productive powers of literature, describing […]

its participation in the construction of gender, racialized, and otherwise minoritized subjects”

(ibid, x). “Interpretive onus” is a telling choice of phrase: it is one level of remove from

requiring literature to participate directly in these constructions, and instead places the

14 Definitionally debatable here, as in: “can there be a marginal protagonist?”

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responsibility on the interpretations of cultural studiers. But the minoritized subjects in

Robles’s formulation remain passive, as they would in Casey Plett’s conception of the “gender

novel,” in which minoritarian subjects are written to type, or in Halberstam’s above referenced

bad motivations for telling trans stories. Robles leaves open the possibility that it is cultural

studies itself that is minoritizing, perhaps lacking the tools to operate outside the Master’s

dictates of the Academy. For its part, minor literature is about more than the subject position

of its authors, it is a variety of autotheory accessible only to those seeking to write community

according to deterritorialized experience.

On Genres and the Queering Thereof

Trans minor literature requires ranges in this study: first, ranges of theory. While

Deleuze and Guattari are indeed the “spark” for invigorating a concept of minor literature,

retrofitting a contemporary literature to a theory driven by the work of a single author is

inappropriate and ill-suited. Though the original concept of a minoritarian literary corpus is one

that gives lip service to communitarian potential and transformative political force, these

cannot be “proven” with Kafka alone. As such, the range of theoretical and critical sources

range from the anthropological/sociological to the literary/aesthetic and back again, proposing

not a theory of the minor, but attempting to trace how the minoritarian might (self-)theorize.

To be anti-epistemological in what is ostensibly a literary monograph is to require a clear

stakes-setting for different varieties of knowledge formation and then a catalog of what is to be

done in the absence or opposition of majoritarian assumptions. Furthermore, this range needs

to theorize how community is or is not theorized in novels—by their very nature, the sustained

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output of a single creator—and what kind(s) of politics putatively emerge. It is a different sort

of constellation, which will be reinforced by the brief subgeneric menu to follow. Finally, while

the theorizing which comprises the first part of this study attempts to use literature as a foil for

concepts largely situated as explanatory, that of the second part operates on a plane that sets

literature in direct conversation with any theorizing of my own or others.

In considering the range of subgenres within the minor literature at hand, one is struck

by at least two conclusions: first, there is no de facto limitation on the genres of minor

literature; that is, there are not minor subgenres (even if there may be major ones). Second,

the very concept of subgenre within the novel form only further reveals the

hetero/homonormativity and chrononormativity embedded in assumptions which undergird

the form. For instance, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is the road novel of this group, Maria Griffiths

standing in as this study’s rebel without a cause. She recognizes that she is playing out a kind of

privileged “loner dude” fantasy, but not that it’s simply the latest iteration of a Jack Kerouac by-

way-of Holden Caulfield loop. The queering comes in as the protagonist muses on her own

relative asexuality/aromantic-ality and the lessons she has gleaned and is willing to impart on

another (possible) trans woman.

Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, Casey Plett’s Little Fish, and Jia Qing Wilson-

Yang’s Small Beauty are the family novels, though each is equally defined by a quest without a

clear beginning or momentous end, as well as by the family members who are absent at least as

much as by those present in the narrative. They each deal in different, overlapping valences of

community, from chosen to biological family, and state-recognized minority designation

(Indigenous, Mennonite, Chinese migrant, respectively). Their relative-loner protagonists are

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not reacting against family or community, but navigating sex-gender and their relationship to

the world and the Master’s precepts for their existence according to experiential knowledge

and, in some instances, trauma.

Though there is a deep vein of science fiction in trans literature, the deterritorializations

charted in this study are perhaps more immediately visible, and with less recourse to a specific

subgenre, in largely eliding this category. Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

is the prime exemplar of fantastic and irreal elements—it may even satisfy the rubric of

“magical realism”—though some of its most exciting experiments are with form (blending

poetry, fable, and epistolary) and voice (the narration strafes between direct address to the

reader, free indirect discourse, and third-person reportage). But the sense of magic is palpable

in Thom’s novel, right down to ghosts and sentient statues. Torrey Peters’ Infect Your Friends

and Loved Ones would be easy to categorize as dystopic sci-fi, but again, the major innovation

here is jumping between chronologies to detail the non-linear ways in which amative

relationships are re-membered and dis-membered. Still, a virus which forces those infected to

choose their sex-gender is clearly not explicitly available in the here and now.

Confessions of the Fox is this study’s preeminent historical novel, though it, too, has a

twinge of alchemical science, inventing an experimental opiate which plays a key role in the

unfolding of the history. Still, Jordy Rosenberg seems careful with both the period accuracies

and notable (and remarked upon) unlikelihoods or impossibilities in the main text. Roz

Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull: A Novel of Manners is similarly historical, not simply by virtue of

the picture it paints of Chicago’s queer/trans underground of a generation ago, but also in the

ways in which it plays with the conventions of a novel of manners or domestic novel. Each of

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these works juxtaposes older and more recent forms, Kaveney’s employing a noirish pulp motif,

and Rosenberg’s tracking a contemporary annotator/narrator in a series of footnotes

containing more text than the main narrative running above it. One could also argue that

Torrey Peters’ The Masker is of a piece with these works as well, as it speaks to a particular time

and place in trans lesbian culture, and runs its strange courtship narrative against a

thriller/mystery plotting.

Though the concept of “experimental fiction”15 can be redundant or vacuous in equal

measure, T Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing the Body Moves Through and Juliana Huxtable’s

Mucus in My Pineal Gland each press against the boundaries of the novel and break through in

ways that the other novels in this study do not attempt to. Each has a relatively consistent

narrative voice, but neither concerns itself with any kind of typical narrative arc, nor consistent

pacing or timescale, instead knitting together disparate impressions and vignettes which

nonetheless accrue to a sense of character development and ideology. Both works also trade in

poetry, challenging generic distinctions between fictive prose and poetic forms. Their formal

experimentation certainly adds different shades to the potential deterritorializations of this

minor literature, but perhaps more remarkable is how comfortably they sit alongside the other

categories of novels drawn out here.

On that note, one could argue that Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s Sketchtasy represent different deformations of (anti-

)Bildungsroman, as each tracks the “development” of a single protagonist and the

dialectical/hermeneutic impact of that development on the people around them. Paul denudes

15 Somewhat of a case for autofiction will be made slightly later in this study as well.

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the category by virtue of its protagonist’s ability to change sex-gender characteristics at will,

which renders development an academic or scientific exercise rather than a longitudinal

process of shorter or more epochal events. Sketchtasy, on the other hand, does track changes

in its main character, but as with Paul, there is little sense of growth, development, or even

additive change by the end of the work. The novels are not circular, per se, but instead could

be thought of as fractal, multiple affective sine curves, helixed and recursive, mysterious and

ultimately—in the narrow sense—unsatisfying as regards the centuries-long history of

Bildungsroman.

In a certain sense, the novel most defined by a signal event and affective reaction is

Hazel Jane Plante’s Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian). Though it would not be inaccurate to

label it a novel of mourning and memorial, that mantle would fail to recognize the peculiarity of

the central device. Where the tradition of novels whose frame narrative concerns sifting

through a deceased person’s papers and other effects, Little Blue instead regards the

production of a new volume as a memento mori of sorts. The narrator is careful to remind the

reader that she will neither learn nor reveal much about the recently passed Vivian, and instead

the novel’s titular encyclopedia is a coping mechanism for both the loss of a friend and the

reality of navigating life without her.

In closing this section on genre, it is worth noting that there are no inheritance novels,

marriage plots (unless one includes Fox, which is a stretch), industrial novels, domestic novels,

etc.. Are these forms simply dead, as an analysis such as Franco Moretti’s Maps, Graphs, and

Trees (2005) might suggest? If so, are they dead because they are major, or major because they

are dead? The primary novels of these studies are sorted into certain definable, legible

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categories above; they could just as soon be grouped three times in three different

configurations. The rest of the study, then, will go to some lengths to complicate generic

distinctions, seeking instead other machineries of resistance to classification and easy

taxonomies.

Autofiction/theory as Deterritorialization

Autofiction and autotheory each has an almost canonical origin story, obligatorily

repeated in each next article or book regarding either. They are both instructive in noting how

minor literature as a concept does or does not represent the designated “auto,” especially as

these minoritarian novels are by definition fiction, and I am attempting to theorize them.

Autofiction can be seen as a more resilient (and perhaps simply more attractive) recoding of

surfiction and parafiction16, two designations developed in the 1970s to account for

contemporary movements in avant-garde and postmodernist fictional practices, respectively.

The term itself is almost universally traced to Serge Doubrovsky’s description of his 1977 novel

Fils, attempting to distinguish it from autobiographical fiction or narrative and reassert the

fictionality of a first-person narrator bearing the same name as the author. In English, Chris

Kraus’s I Love Dick may remain the most notable and cited example of autofiction. The

significance of this origin story, at least for the moment, is simply that the term “autofiction” is

itself a kind of manifestation of autotheory: Doubrovsky sought a neologism to describe what

he saw as a worthwhile category distinction between his work and other parallel currents in

fiction.

16 See Marjorie Worthington The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction. (2).

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Autotheory has a similarly fixed origin narrative, also instantiated by an author’s

description of their work, this time Maggie Nelson’s autofictional The Argonauts. However, in

this instance, there is an equally canonical “discovery” story, in Nelson’s claim that she “stole”

the idea from Paul B Preciado’s Testo Junkie. Robyn Wiegman (Special Issue: Autotheory

Theory, 2020) suggests a twinned lineage for autotheory which may be united by considering it

an outgrowth of a cis author writing autofiction about their love of a trans man (as in The

Argonauts) and a trans man writing autotheoretical personal narrative about his own

experiences with arrested hormonal transition (as in Testo Junkie). Wiegman writes, “In some

conversations, autotheory’s genealogy is forged in collaboration with transgender studies as

both modes of address rupture the normativities safeguarded by traditional conventions drawn

around genre and disciplinarity alike” (7). This seems sufficiently of a piece with some of the

aims of minor literature: name normativities and normativizing forces, nail down who or what is

the normative, chart ruptures both potential and realized. Put another way, Lauren Fournier

(2021) writes of Preciado’s (and Virginie Despentes’s) work not as origin, but as marking “a shift

in the tenor of autotheoretical writing,” taking up “issues related to trans and gender-

nonconforming bodies and subjectivities, radical sexuality (or those existing on the margins of

the existing queer discourses), and the politics of sex work and fucking” (13). This study

proposes that the same perspectival shift in minor literature is similarly equipped for and

attuned to this conception of radical sexuality, as well as these politics.

But autotheory is perhaps most clearly expressed through fictive literature; as Wiegman

notes: “In other itineraries, autotheory is read in relation to its closest literary cousin,

autofiction” (Special Issue, Autotheory Theory, 7). The value of standpoint epistemology is

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taken up elsewhere in this study, under considerations of specific critical deterritorializations,

as a revaluation of situated standpoint as a form of epistemic resistance, but here it is worth

noting that the only theory in the purview of minor literature is that which is produced, refined,

challenged, or catalyzed by fiction. Minor literature produces its own (necessarily political and

communitarian) theory, and standpoint epistemology offers an alternative heuristic for valuing

the theory that emerges from fictive literature and narrative more broadly. But as to the

matter at hand, Fournier again gives voice to a definition that runs very close to what this study

seeks in contemporary trans novels: “autotheory seems a particularly appropriate term for

works that exceed existing genre categories and disciplinary bounds, that flourish in the liminal

spaces between categories, that reveal the entanglement of research and creation, and that

fuse seemingly disparate modes to fresh effects” (ibid, 2). The applicability of “exceed” is least

immediate; minor literature uses the language of remapping and deterritorialization, and any

notion of excess is perhaps dedicated to intermittent reterritorialization of both form and

content. And the notion of liminal space is complicated, if not obviated, by the fungibility of the

phobic public spheres and their incursions into the lives of minoritarian subjects at the call of

the Master. But those latter clauses, revealing entanglements and fusing modes, are very much

the stuff of this minor literature. Fournier goes on to note autotheory’s “innate troubling of

dominant epistemologies”—a minor literary value, to be certain—and its “capacity to make

space for new ways of theorizing and understanding [its creators’] lives” (ibid). Epistemology as

a positivistic truth-telling oracle is one of the Master’s most insidious and effective

philosophical tools; it shrouds and indemnifies all manner of exclusion, colonization, and harm;

troubling it sounds like the first salvo in a much lengthier battle.

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It is perhaps the “theory” element which is initially more vexing to the minor literary

appropriation of autotheory here. These novels are not rife with citational information (save

Confessions of the Fox, due in no small part to its para-academic context and archival/historical

subject matter), and tend not to belie any critical/philosophical lineage in particular. A number

of them do meditate directly on conditions of transition and navigating phobic publics, but to

call any of them conduct manuals or self-help guides would be a stretch. But theory can exist in

the negative space of Theory, refusing the Master’s carefully manicured institutional boundary

lines, troubling the oppositional firmness of “theory” against the potential softness of “fiction.”

Yangbing Er (2019) offers just such a troubling in describing one vein of autofiction as a critique

of a postfeminist discourse in its reflection “on the enduring marginality of the female artistic

identity” (317). Whereas the postfeminist subject is “inward looking,” and broadly “affiliated to

neoliberal ideologies of entrepreneurship” (ibid, 319), the autofictional “I” is politicized by its

confessional mode—a refusal to affiliate. Er sees this “focus on the centrality of the self” as

reasserting the “I” as a confessional “recourse to a postfeminist culture perpetuating the

depoliticized and ahistorical facets of neoliberal individualization.” What is most interesting,

though, is that the best recourse to the neoliberal progress metanarrative which gives (Er’s

account of) postfeminism its own theoretical heft is a refusal of its terms of success. Er

suggests that in “its failure to achieve full coherence” between fictional subject and author, this

autofiction “attends to the continued marginalization of women’s identities.” Furthermore, this

“failure” debunks the assumption of postfeminism having attained “fullness of subjective self”

in “unrestricted access to all spheres of society” (ibid). Autofiction, in its apparent particularity,

actually serves as a deindividuating gesture, averring that there is “no empowerment to be had

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[…] because of deep-seated gender inequalities that continue to mark the roles of women in

contemporary society”; injustices “obscured by the smokescreen engendered by the deceitful

convergence between postfeminism and imperialism.” Minor literature is perhaps not

burdened with this particular smokescreen; its remapping is equally adversarial towards both

imperialism and a range of exclusionary feminisms. Still, there is a strong resonance between

critique of postfeminism’s corporate inclinations and disidentifying with majoritarian

presumptions regarding time, identity, and labor. When Er refers to autofiction as “strategies

undertaken” to realize “transgressive feminist potential” (ibid), she offers an opening for

detailing minor literature’s own strategic theorizing. These are embodied theories,

speculations on ways to live and ways to be, what constitutes a life or a lifespan, and whose

labor and sex are worthy and hold value.

But again, this minor literature is not confessional per se. And furthermore, while it

seems to satisfy the first element of Phillippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact,”17 in which the

“author is simultaneously a socially responsible real person and the producer of a discourse”

(11), it fails the latter, “a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name.” Lejeune’s

fixation on names gives an enormous weight to their signifying status for identity. Minor

literary writers do of course produce discourse, but as everything in the literature takes on

communitarian value, names are called into question. More than one of the protagonists in

these novels lacks names altogether, and others modulate between them, calling very much

into question the “properness” of any. In speculating on his gender identification “crossing,”

Paul B Preciado notes that he had to identify as transsexual “so that the medico-legal system

17 See On Autobiography (1989).

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would acknowledge me as a living human being” (AU, 30). A looming element in this

identification is a change in name, but the name on the book’s jacket is not quite so unitary as a

marker of authenticity, realness, facticity. Preciado narrates the suicide of an adolescent trans

boy who had after no small effort obtained his name change on official documents: “law was

powerless against the norm” (AU, 149). The primacy (and properness) of the name is another

tool available to the Master to adjudicate identity, and minor literature attempts to void any

such contracts—or at the very least, register them as pacts, perhaps signed in blood, with entire

subject positions. When Marjorie Worthington (2018) notes that autofiction demonstrates that

autobiography “is no better situated to ‘prove’ its referentiality than is fiction” (9), the same

might extend to minor literature’s ability to propose a more spectral referentiality than either.

But Lauren Fournier returns us to the tetchiness of t/Theory: “Does the invocation of

theory lead to the work being perceived as more critically legitimate than if it had softer

designations? If the word is coded as male or masculine—a coding that is compounded when

compared in oppositional ways to the ‘feminized’ genres of life-writing and memoir—then it is

not surprising that the notion of autotheory is gendered, too” (Autotheory as Feminist Practice,

13). It is important, then, to be clear in the timbre of the invocation: minor literature is

autotheoretical in that it is self-theorizing. Regardless of the extent to which it deterritorializes

(which requires an initial antecedent territory) or disidentifies (similarly, a referent

identification must precede disidentification), the theories it generates must be its own: its own

community/ies, its own politics, and, crucially, its own remapping. Fournier cites a slightly

different angle on autotheory/fiction in the guise of artist Jeanne Randolph’s ficto-criticism.18

18 Cited from Randolph’s “Is Ficto-Criticism an Invasive Species?” (2016).

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Randolph writes: ficto-criticism possesses “unmistakable pliability—handy for perversions of

the dominant form (of consumerism, performance, criticism, lectures, research). Ficto-criticism

is like an amoeba. It’s got no boss” (ibid, 21). Pliability is an interesting value: bend but don’t

break, squeeze into gaps and expose them as wider than they appear. Randolph’s list of

dominant forms—those to which ficto-criticism’s boss-less-ness won’t cotton—is equally

pliable. Where consumerism meets criticism, there is inevitably evidence of the Master’s hand.

But if the charge here is to delineate ficto-critical elements of minor literature, to propose how

machines of expression can allow form and content to take flight in revolutionary potentiality,

and if this invokes theory, the question may and likely should persist: whither the “auto”? That

is, if naming is as likely a Master tool of category/boundary/suppression as it is an outcropping

for anonymity/transgression/liberation, then who gets to be the auto of autotheory/fiction? As

Fournier puts it, “for whom is autotheory a truly reparative practice?” (26). This query reads as

corollary to Riki Anne Wilchins’ speculating on the faculty of trans studies more broadly (“does

it make us feel better?”), but this time it is one of access. If autotheory is accessible only to

those already established in the academy or “public,” for those with “a name” (or even just a

name), for those who have an “I” from which to proceed, then who does it serve? Who gets to

be a theory-making subject, and who gets to theorize themselves? It is impossible to argue

with Fournier’s point that “Not everyone has had access to working in a mode that bridges [the]

chasm (a chasm wrought by certain assumptions in the texts constituting ‘Western philosophy’)

between autobiography and theory, the body and the mind” (43), but for minor literature it is

equally important to wonder: who seeks this access? That chasm, and those assumptions, may

seem far further afield for minor literature and minoritarian authors, and yet—autofiction and

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autotheory both initially stem from what ostensibly remain novels. So minor literature may

work from neither of the precipices of this canyon, instead using fiction as evidence of

experience, signifying to community and deterritorializing form and content. Fournier notes

that “feminist autotheory positions subject-centered work as theory using a range of tactics

and strategies” (54, author’s emphasis), and here it runs closest to minor literary adventures in

theory. This study questions the “auto” of those equally subjectified (in being named,

(mis)recognized, othered) by the Master and made subject-less (via exclusion, exscripture,

erasure) by his dictates to the phobic publics. Perhaps fictive literature—the novel—allows the

“auto” a bit more pliability of its own, slipping from protagonist to community, author to

audience, a hermeneutics neither reparative nor especially suspicious. There is a putative

difference between writing about, for, or through the minoritarian, and the autotheoretical

impulse may be expressed most fully—or, excuse the clumsy syllabification, minoritarian-ly—

through fiction, in which “I” can circuit through “we” and even “you” within the space of a

sentence without upsetting the syntax of a work.

Deterritorializing Trans Studies

Riki Ann Wilchins (2013), near the turn of this century, asks: why does the surge of trans

and gender theory “so little address or assuage our pain?”, suggesting that these branches of

theory might have some obligation to do so. It is perhaps unsurprising that the fiction under

consideration has very little to say about trans studies or theory explicitly. It may be because

the theoretical notes that follow are notably inept at addressing or assuaging pain, or simply do

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not care to do so. But they are rehearsed with the quite overt aim of considering how minor

literature can constitute its own theoretical underpinning19, as well as interact with some of the

still nascent threads of a more “formal” trans studies which remains (and possibly ought to

remain) in a shifting and not-uncomfortable relationship to gender and queer studies.

David Valentine (2007), an anthropologist and linguist by training, notes that the

institutionalization and naming of transgender studies “presupposes a referent,” which, in his

view, is an element of realizing the transgender imaginary. He suggests that this naming, in

addition to realizing this imaginary, further simultaneously stands as evidence of a community

for those concerned with trans representation, which is perhaps not a problem of itself beyond

the singular article “a”—minoritarian subjects seem forever requested, forced, or begged to

gather in a monolith. Valentine is concerned that any singularizing of community is likely to

look a certain way to a certain observer, a concern probably conditioned by some of the past

horrors of his own field, as well as some of its reductive assumptions. But he further specifies

the concern, fearing institutionalization “privileges a particular understanding of ‘gender’ as the

primary experience around which transgender understandings of self are organized, and in turn

is predicated on the assertion of difference from other fields of knowledge and states of being,

in particular, that of homosexuality” (Imagining Transgender, 167). A trans studies which can

“stand on its own” only through contradistinction with queer studies is an impoverished one

indeed, though of course one must be mindful of Feinberg’s note that “the trans population is a

reminder that not everyone who is heterosexual is straight!” (Transgender Warrior, 92).

Valentine puts it another way, as he worries that trans studies is being institutionalized through

19 Whether it is “autotheory” per se or not, this is part of the explosive potential of minor literature.

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understanding gender primarily as social difference (Imagining Transgender, 171). It feels

almost superfluous to detail all the shortcomings of this understanding, but viewing them from

the perspective of an ethnographic study such as Valentine’s reveals the harms to trans people

of color, sex working trans people, and trans folks generally who lack a community support

system which can help keep them housed, safe, and fed if their class position makes these

otherwise impossible. Gender-as-social-difference has neither the gravity of the Master’s

enforcement of the phobias of phobic public spheres nor, frankly, the levity and joy of

disidentificatory performance and solidarity. To remind ourselves of an earlier precondition of

this study: trans minor literature does not, any more than does the existence of trans

minoritarian subjects, simply and strictly deterritorialize gender. That characterization is both

too simplistic and of no (even descriptive) theoretical value to understanding the works at

hand.

This section closes with a brief note on how trans studies may or may not be related to

the three overarching categories of this study, in reverse order of their appearance below. The

labor of sex work has already been briefly detailed—criminalization (in the US) and a neo-

abolitionist legal framework (in Canada) condition the minoritarian subject’s relationship to

many elements of the sex trades. Public phobias around protecting the hetero/homonormative

family and state focus on the sex worker, and, both by extension and in parallel, the

transgender body. Paul B. Preciado sees this focus as ultimately coming down to the Master’s

relationship of command over women: “the power of women to produce pleasure does not

belong to them: it belongs to the State” (AU, 63). Trans studies must name this power,

decouple it from its feminizing/feminized subject position, and deterritorialize labor from the

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Master’s map of (il)licit pleasure. Preciado continues: the “main cause” of the alienation of the

sex worker “depends above all on the non-recognition of her subjectivity and her body as

sources of truth and value: it’s a matter of being able to assert that whores don’t know how to

be, can’t be, are not political or economic subjects in their own right” (ibid, 64). Some of this

language is interchangeable with the Master’s accounting for trans minoritarian subjects; non-

recognition, exterior to both epistemology and its discontents, laboring but not laborers. As

Preciado terms it, “sex workers are the subaltern productive flesh of global capitalism” (ibid).

Trans studies earns its salt not by giving voice to this subaltern, but by recognizing how it is a

force against the global capitalism which seeks to regulate or strangulate it out of existence.

For trans studies to “pass” in the Academy, it must perhaps cease to become—it must

be. There is no room for perpetual remapping in disciplinary study, and perhaps the paths that

queer theory has charted demonstrate how fraught a refusal to canonize and draw borders can

be. Interdisciplinarity is a fiction of indeterminate and variable value in the humanities, it has

its own borders and limitations, seeking always to name the unnamed, to classify and periodize.

If minor literature is the literature of becoming, produced of an unwillingness to endorse (or

submit to) fixed categories and the Master’s institutionalized precepts, then passing is

perfunctory (as if expecting to be discovered as something else) and obfuscatory (as if to hide,

however momentarily), at best. But then, this is not a study seeking to formalize a trans

studies—it simply regards literature, after all.

So what, then, is the time of trans studies, or minor literature, for that matter? The

progressivist impulse is to view minoritarian studies of any ilk as either the “natural” aftereffect

or the necessary forebear of increased toleration/acceptance/recognition/fill-in-the-neoliberal-

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diversity-condition. Either the burgeoning discipline will help define and conscribe its subject,

or else it will legitimize it in a selective rewriting of history and “future prospects.” Wilchins’

initial complaint is a reminder that progress or evolution within the Academy never guarantees

its subjects of study any therapeutic outcome. Still, it’s one thing not to assuage pain—that

ambition might more easily be written off as outside the purview of study—but a failure to

address it sounds like an institutional shortcoming.

To close, then, a couple of ideas from a recent venue for debates over prospects for

trans studies as an academic discipline, drawn from a TSQ special issue20. In “Before Trans

Studies,” Cassius Adair, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Amy Marvin wonder if seeming

shortcomings of trans studies are largely reducible to functional, class-based barriers: “Put

bluntly, the “great failure” of trans studies is that we can’t all afford to write” (309). A more

than fair point; whose voices are represented in academic discourse is perhaps an echelon that

is only narrowing as institutions rely increasingly on adjunct labor and refuse to invest

resources in keeping class sizes smaller and a horde of PhDs employed. Nevertheless, the

authors are willing to speculate on what it would mean to remain in the “before time” of trans

studies, to consider what it might be capable of. “Thus what is this not-yet-here trans studies, a

trans studies of the then and there? To us, another way of asking that question is, What are the

necessary conditions that will make trans life more livable in the here and now?” (ibid, 315).

These do not, at first blush, appear to be different phrasings of the same query. But then, a

horizonal trans studies, one that works equally from imagination and experience, may indeed

offer very real ideas about how to make more livable here and now. Cael M Keegan, in his

20 “Trans* Studies Now,” TSQ V7 No3, August 2020.

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essay “What’s trans* about queer studies now?” from the same issue speculates on the

underpinnings of a trans studies and how it may or may not relate to the previous generation of

queer studies. He writes, “trans* studies has long been concerned with narratology—with the

project of locating narrative structures that will adequately allow for the existence of trans*

bodies and becomings. These concerns arise directly from the epistemic and political needs of

transgender people, some of whose lives have only recently begun to count in the accounting

of which lives matter.” Whether the concern is longstanding or not, narratology requires

narrative, and the (anti-)epistemic needs of minoritarian communities do have a long history of

expression in story. One may, and this study does, debate questions of “matter to whom?” and

“matter how, exactly?”, but political needs only register if people can stay alive long enough to

voice them. Perhaps a minoritarian narratology can offer new means of “locating” with an eye

to addressing, if not automatically assuaging, pain.

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Interlude: Minoritarian, Master, Phobic Publics, Selfrepresentations

Fuck the minoritarian multitude facing a single armed man. (104)

-Paul B Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus

Minority is a meaningless designation, strictly speaking, without a predicate—there

must be a whole out of which the minority constitutes less than half, and a majority which

constitutes more than the minority/ies. It would be oblivious to ignore the political denotations

of minority, from gerrymandering, redlining, and incarcerating out of relevance, to affirmative

actioning, equal protection under law, or more broadly or narrowly constructed doctrines of

rights or representation—it is minority which constructs discourses of diversity. But minority as

a designation is not, of course, strictly a matter of demography or pseudoscientific/eugenicist

phenotyping, it is rather an enforced designation, defined by what it disallows in

contradistinction to majority/ies, and in many instances can be “transcended” through

exceptionalism—there is almost always an “other” on whose backs some who would otherwise

be designated “minority” can stand. So minority is a kind of political fiction, enabled by an

interlocking of other fictions, normativizing stories about subjects, immutable causal triggers

and effects, growth and progress and the presumption of an unbending arrow towards justice

and evolution. Fictions of toleration and its discontents. A minority fiction thematizes the

possibility of the minority tipping into the plurality, and perhaps one day, through whatever

combination of efforts at respectability, identification, and the dreaded assimilation, even an

element of the majority.

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But to be(come) minor is an imaginative act of another stripe. The denotive thrusts of

“minor” are on the one hand diminution, perhaps measured against major but perhaps not,

inconsequential, unworthy of either praise or censure. The minor key in a diatonic scale draws

the third, sixth, and seventh notes down a half-step; it can be used to invoke sadness or

menace to equal effect. The label of “a minor” suggests being under some age, that of sexual

or legal consent, marriageability, participation in elections or military, gambling, driving a car,

or any other activity reserved for the age of majority, though the latter is never described as “a

major.” Minoritarian, though, instigates a sense of community, and not simply a community

without the state-recognized ability to consent, though that could be a characteristic which

unites their experiences. The minoritarian is defined both from within and from without,

registering and comprehending the definition if not always the logics that instantiate and

reinforce it. It is a nonnumerical definition, qualitative rather than quantitative, subject to

incremental and provisional alteration. The fictions of the minoritarian are not so easily

bounded as those of minority, they take up territory by stealth or by virtue of being ignored,

challenging convention by operating according to different systems of account and value.

Is the novel a majoritarian medium? Does it exclude or overlook in its genealogies and

lineages, its presumptions regarding time and identity, its attempts to inscribe lives in bounded

packages of description and dialogue? It is not. Whatever boundaries the novel has

established in its Grand Traditions, they are subject to transgression, remapping, and

annexation as enclaves of resistance. A minor literature is one which borrows, steals, renames,

and imprints the terms and borders of the literature alongside, against, and within which it

operates its machines of content and expression.

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The Master

Any theory in these pages is dedicated to the unmasking and unmaking of a/the

majoritarian force who is ultimately fictitious, but whose fictions are so pervasive and powerful

that resisting them requires something beyond (a supplement) or besides (an alternative)

objectivity. I will call this force the Master, and his territory is the objective, the empirical, and

the bounded. The Master is not the Grand Tradition, though the bourgeois novel certainly has

the capacity to verify his maps and to strengthen his dictates. Neither is the Master the

normative—the negatively-defined not-poor, not-Black, not-Brown, not-foreign-but-not-

indigenous, not-queer, not-trans (what is cis but not-trans?), not-disabled, not-drug-using—but

instead how the normative operates. He sets the field of normativizing, what can and should

fall into the bell curve, and where the margins fail to name the marginal. Everything with the

Master is constructed as a (false) choice; the illusion of choice under late-stage Capitalism suits

him even better than explicitly feudal or autocratic moments in Western history. Everything is

a technology, nothing is a tool.

The Master has no politics, he is a politics. He is as comfortable operating from

conservative-cum-fascistic fantasies of a nonexistent, simpler past, or bootstrapping rhetoric of

manifest destiny and exceptionalism. His precepts may be even more devastating in the seat of

liberal-progressivism’s slide to the center, relishing its principles of representation and equal

protection under the law, always his law, always his definitions of sufficiency and necessity. He

supports the mythos of change under a progress narrative that is just fungible enough to fit

“policy” in any partisan politics.

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The Master codes “the real,” and must validate any episteme of epistemology. He holds

that his maps are complete, and/or models for charting any “new” territory. But he does not

hold that any new territory actually exists, just that borders can be redrawn with thicker ink and

cleaner lines. His are the maps of the contemporary, tracing uncannily similar provinces over

those of the immediate past.

Far from prohibiting it, the Master in fact demands representation. One must “be

somebody,” within clear (albeit subject to perpetual threat of arbitrary change) limits. He seeks

to limit or deny self-dictated embodiment: individualism ends at the moment of non-

representation or persistent illegibility. The Master determines when the minoritarian is

sufficiently legible, and when they become dangerous in their marginality.

The Master works through institution, in the broadest sense and in all senses. His

institutionalization modulates between elision and punishment. He hates ambivalence or

agnosticism, and champions objectivity, linearity, and erasure (so long as it is complete).

For minor literature, though, the most pressing, overarching, impossible function of the

Master is his clarifying/illuminating/citing of the phobias of the phobic public spheres. They will

beg for his approbation, and gratefully receive the details of his newest prohibitions. The

minoritarian subject need not be the Master’s open combatant, though at intervals this will

certainly be the case. As a final illustration, Jean Genet’s attempt to name the Master, to make

this enemy corporeal, subject to the abuse he directly or indirectly metes out:

“J.G. seeks, or goes in search of, or would like to find—or never to find—the delicious disarmed enemy whose balance is off, whose profile is vague, whose face is unacceptable, the enemy knocked down by the slightest puff of air, the already humiliated slave, throwing himself out of a window when the sign is given, the enemy who has been beaten: blind, deaf, mute.”

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This enemy does not sound like much, but humiliation is in fact part of the game. Rendered

legible and whole, the minoritarian subject both enrages and humiliates the Master. Genet

recognizes the expediency of an adversarial relationship:

“I want the total enemy, one who would hate me beyond all bounds and in all spontaneity, but the subjected enemy, beaten by me before ever laying eyes on me. And irreconcilable with me in any case. No friends. Especially no friends: an enemy declared but not divided.”

The Master must be singular, a unitary force from which the dictates and decrees are issued,

without committee or consensus—that comes automatically, and later. Genet recognizes his

irreconcilability with this Master even at the height of his own literary celebrity. The moment

the minoritarian subject has subjected the Master, as minor literature does and must do, the

upper (lower) hand has been gained. And what exactly to do with this enemy of J.G.’s?

“I’ll give him all I’ve got: blows, slaps, kicks, I’ll have him gnawed by starving foxes, I’ll make him eat English food, attend the House of Lords, be received at Buckingham Palace, fuck Prince Phillip, get fucked by him, live for a month in London, dress like me, sleep where I sleep, live in my stead: I seek the declared enemy.” (“J.G. Seeks,” The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews (2004), 3).

Genet’s declaration is his fiction and drama, then his activism and defiant transgression of

borders in the Middle East. I do not know if the Master can become the declared enemy again,

but, then, this is my declaration.

Phobic Public Sphere(s)

What are the threats of the nonnormative, and against whom are they directed? Or, to

reverse the direction of this technology of power, how does the Master impart and enforce his

will? A sphere is three-dimensional, has edgeless and thus corner-less contours, a smooth and

finite surface. It separates a definite interior from a delimited exterior. A public sphere, then,

might cleave private from public, civic from personal, but it could also be more predatory,

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gobbling up elements of life which it seeks to control via narratives of “public good.” But a

phobic public sphere is built on principles of inexorable binarism; first, inside/outside, but after

that it can vary, playing at different registers and modulating to the melody of the Master’s

direction. These publics are afraid because they are told to be; in no insignificant sense, they

are public by virtue of their fears, for these fears are the delineating lines between inside and

outside the security1 of their spheres. They can comprise spheres medical, legal, familial,

historical, cultural, scientific, educational, and epistemological.

This last phobic public sphere may be particularly instructive as regards the mechanics

of the others: the phobic publics are suspicious of alternative forms of knowledge- or meaning-

making. They bar minoritarian subjects from participation as their phobias emanate outwards,

labeling and verifying with the Master that their fears are both historically-rooted and

sufficiently up-to-date. These spheres require maintenance, they must be periodically (if

superficially) reconsidered, often through the illusion of progress and inclusivity, two of the

Master’s favorite tunes.

The phobic public spheres operate from metanarratives of pathology and the

pathological, as well as responsibility. They see their territory as worthy of defense, and use

violence as the preferred tool for encountering their phobias. And yet, the spheres can be

somewhat porous, as a phobia is rendered that much more weaponizable if it presumes some

1 As opposed to safety. It is a principle of most abolitionist logics that the carceral state provides security to some, but safety to very few. The phobic public spheres are designed for security, but they never know safety. The phobias themselves are conative of the unsafety of the world outside pressing ever inwards, whether this pressure is real or perceived.

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vague understanding of its object. In this way, the spheres are prismatic, turning lenses on the

objects of phobia to read them into the Master’s ledger, or to evidence their erasure.

Selfrepresentations

Paul B. Preciado writes:

The “proliferation of new critical terms is essential: it acts as a solvent on normative languages, as an antidote to dominant categories. On the one hand, it is imperative to distinguish ourselves from the dominant scientific, technological, commercial, legal languages that comprise the cognitive skeleton of the epistemology of sexual difference and techno-patriarchal capitalism. On the other, it is urgent to invent a new grammar that allows us to imagine another social organization of forms of life. […] Both languages are trans-border strategies.” (An Apartment on Uranus, 41).

Nicola Mai’s (2018) research could be described as ethnography of trans-border

strategies. His studies have taken him through Europe and North Africa, where he interacts

with migrant sex working populations (represented primarily by qualitative research involving

intensive relationships with individual subjects) to draw conclusions concerning why people

migrate, why they engage in the sex trades, and how one facilitates or complicates the other.

The relevance of his work to mine, beyond the fact that he interviews and considers the

experiences of predominately trans sex working people, comes in two main areas. First, he is

invested in pulling apart a series of “strategic conflations” of sex work and trafficking (Mobile

Orientations, xi), and the tools he uses to do so are useful in thinking about other phobic public

conflations that may or may not be staged and/or dissolved by minor literature. Some that

immediately come to mind are the potential conflation of queer and trans, minority and

minoritarian, or content and expression. Mai’s universe may be one more concerned with

individual motivation than aesthetic production and communitarianism, but even as the

distinction is opened, it threatens to collapse. Second, Mai’s work is all about borders, which

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are a powerful, if perhaps overused, metaphor when it comes to discussing minor literature.

Deleuze and Guattari instantiated their concept regarding Kafka and the various ways in which

he was bordered or bordered himself off from the adjacent German literary tradition. Their

offhand note regarding “blacks in America” suggests that they saw the potential for more

figurative borders as well—though there is nothing metaphorical in the myriad ways in which

the phobic public spheres bar minoritarian subjects from participation. As the study considers

time, passing, and, indeed, sex work, various borders become tangible and rigid while others

turn to dust or can be stepped over within the minor literature at hand. Even as he traverses

national borders in his work on migrancy, Mai is first concerned with borders in how subjects

account for their experiences.

Mai defines “biographical borders” as “standardized, discursive repertoires” for rights

recognition (ibid, xii-xiii). This concept attempts to explain how migrant sex workers are forced

to shift between different and often conflicting versions of their past experiences and current

identities in order not only to evade persecution, but also occasionally to find asylum or access

services. Minor literature might deploy biographical borders in terms of how one accounts for

the conflict between their “biological age” and biographical one(s), what “passing” means in

various locales and in various company, and how sex work or less formalized transactional

survival sex requires navigating such borders. Mai himself offers one way into the first of these

through another of his concepts, that of “errant mobility,” or “unresolved passage to adulthood

that generates an undetermined psychological and social liminality” (ibid, xiii). While a few of

the terms here are worth further unpacking, one form of errant mobility as Mai defines it is

notably useful to consider in terms of minor literature. The amount of wrangling it would

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require to properly define “psychological liminality” is not really worth the time in this study,

and in fact, liminality is generally not all that useful a concept for minor literature. However,

the through line Mai traces from a kind of arrested adolescence (whether perceived from the

outside or experienced directly) to a socially liminal subject position is instructive. What does

adulthood mean for a literature? Does an adult literature win (or award) prizes, appear in

curricula, sell lots of copies, bear comparison to “the classics,” even become “the classics2”?

There may seem a risk of a disservice to Mai’s concepts by (over-)metaphorizing the

concept of “migrant” or migration, but as he works with predominately trans folks, and

certainly those who occupy multiple minoritarian subject positions, the appropriation for this

study seems fair. Mai defines his titular concept, “mobile orientations,” as “socially established

alignments of objects, mobilities, and models of subjectivity that frame migrants’ capacity to

act” (ibid, xiii). Among these mobilities would be, presumably, errant ones, and socially

established alignments such as those listed are certainly of interest here. The novel, as a form,

is broadly concerned with subjects’ capacity to act, and minor literature is defined in part by its

thematizing moments of resistance (or acquiescence) to socially established constraints on

locus and agency. Mai goes on to suggest that “being mobile has become a key, late-modern

discourse that reproduces social distinction and exclusion,” (ibid, xiv), and mobility is certainly a

literal mode of expression in each of the works constellated in the minor literature under

consideration. How and why minoritarian subjects move or express mobility is governed in part

by the porousness of the phobic public spheres. Within Mai’s particular populations, he seeks

2 The prime candidate here would be Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, which remains out of print and without a US publisher as of this writing (2/21). Though Torey Peters’ Detransition, Baby (2021) is now a New York Times bestseller.

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to challenge an aforementioned “strategic conflation” of choice and agency under what he

terms “sexual humanitarianism.” This form of sexual humanitarianism is the “global emergence

of a neo-abolitionist epistemology that legitimizes targeted forms of control and protection of

social groups defined as vulnerable in relation to their sexual orientation and behavior” (ibid,

vii). A variety of minoritarian subject positions fulfill this sort of vulnerability, though who is

controlled or protected and how varies wildly across race, class, and gender expression. Non-

heteronormative sexual orientations include sex workers and many queer and trans folks, sure,

but so too could include any non-reproductive sexual practice which threatens state-

sanctioned, monogamous, amatively-bonded relationships (i.e. marriage). For Mai, this sexual

humanitarianism in inculcated in an “end demand” epistemology which seeks to abolish sex

work by carcerally punishing clients and “saving” workers. This carceral epistemology could be

applied to trans folks too: by enforcing gender binarism through forced intersex surgeries,

denying or restricting gender-affirming medical treatment, or policing a myriad of broader or

narrower cultural, social, and political impositions on gender expression and identity, there is a

form of sexual humanitarianism which seeks to deploy Halberstam’s three motivations, to

stabilize, rationalize, and/or trivialize trans lives and stories.

Mai’s intersectional analysis relies on unmaking assumptions regarding the

consistency—or even evolution/progression—of gender presentation across biographical

borders. He offers the de-hyphenated “selfrepresentation” as a means of denoting “how

identities and subjectivities emerge through the constant interaction between subjects and the

social worlds they inhabit” (ibid, 6). The removal of any separation between “self” and

“representation” is meant to suggest the subsumption and transcendence of differences

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between social and individual representation. Where selfrepresentation as a larger concept

removes any copula or gap, one specific selfrepresentation installs one. The dash which holds

together yet keeps from collapsing “sex-gendered,” Mai suggests, helps to “indicate how

people understand and represent themselves in relation to the interlinked dimensions of

sexuality and gender” (ibid, 4). This construction is intended to recognize how selves are

“specifically and intersectionally gendered and ‘sexed’ at the same time” (ibid, 4-5). Whether

or not this is the end-all for a minoritarian consideration of the intersection of sex and gender

(and it almost certain needn’t be), it may be a way around being forced into the “all gender is

performance/gendering is all performed” or “sex=biology, gender=sociology/self-

identity/culture” camps.

When it comes to embodiment itself, Mai borrows another concept to encapsulate the

intersection of class and status with what and who is allowed to self-determine (or perhaps

selfrepresent?). He terms the “boditarian” an expression of the “prevalence of bodily over self-

reflexive and verbalized dimensions” (ibid, 80). In his study, the boditarian is an antecedent to

the mobile orientations of young migrant men in the sex trades. But more broadly, Mai wants

the boditarian to suggest the “displacing” and “using” of bodies to challenge heteronormative

class- and age-based exclusions from social mobility. More than taking advantage of fetishes or

transforming one’s bodily presentation in different contexts, the boditarian suggests a field of

representation in which the bodily takes precedence over other varieties of content and

expression. Mai writes that the boditarian expresses the “class-based salience of the embodied

(rather than verbalized) aspiration to transcend the racialized and sex-gendered normative

limits that restrict people’s entitlements to socioeconomic and spatial mobility” (ibid, 81).

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Again, novels are all about various sorts of mobility, and the recency of the minor literature

under consideration places it at a point in the development of the novel at which it can and

does play with all sorts of generic tropes. It is worth mentioning here again that the genre of

the trans autobiography or memoir has been collected and written about a fair amount; if there

is a “classic” body of trans literature, it is likely in this and adjacent forms. Jordy Rosenberg

even jokes about the unavoidability of Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs

of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite as a stand-in for any trans studies with collegiate

gender studies courses in the 1980s. This is all to say, these are novels and there is a reason

they are novels. The “mobility to express mobility” perhaps stands predominant among them,

and each takes advantage of fictional licenses, be they fantastical, cultural, geographic, or

otherwise, to theorize and consider minoritarian aspirations to mobility. Perhaps all novels are

also aspirational in some way, but in their revolutionary potential, this minor literature certainly

is.

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Part I

Chapter 1

Deterritorialization

Deterritorialization emerges from language, which is perhaps not so surprising, as it is a

concept within minor literature, after all. But still, what does it mean to define literary

language in terms of territory? It might be as simple as nationalism, or some other

demographic designation which could be localized or diasporic. Which literal or figurative space

is written within or from will be important to finding any kinship or connection between a

literary body which might constitute a minor literature. The motivating question, the true

alpha which does not need Kafka or anyone else from which to proceed, could be: “How many

people today live in a language that is not their own?” (TML, 19). There is much to unpack

here, and in some ways, the rest of this study will go about offering various ways to define

terms or consider how delimited they might be. “Owning” one’s language, or perhaps “renting”

is the better analog, carries with it a political economy which can render those with less capital

out of place, out of time, and out of language. Paul B. Preciado invokes just such a vocalization

when he writes that the people who interest him do so by virtue of one’s ability “to speak a

language that is not your own and to make it vibrate with another accent, to make your words

be grammatically correct, but phonetically deviant” (AU, 240). This may superficially read

simply as speaking in a nonnative tongue, but Preciado’s use of grammar and phoneme can be

taken more broadly. This use of language is of “the non-peoples, the ones still being invented,

the non-political communities whose sovereignty exceeds the limits of power” (ibid). This last

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seeming-contradiction is in line with Preciado’s general sense of abstention-as-resistance,

invoking communities whose non-politics (only because politics has not rendered them

sufficiently/tolerably legible) is inhered in their supra-powerful sovereignty. This sovereignty

may be neither desirable to nor even registered by the Master; he would be equal parts

surprised and dismissive at the deployment of the term. Preciado continues to define these

(non-)peoples: “the silent bodies of the world who do not qualify even as a people”; those “to

whom no one conceded the legitimacy of political subjects” (ibid). The s/elective proficiency in

the Master’s tongue is dangerous, it can escape the diligent-but-manic phobic surveillance of

the public spheres.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the deterritorialization of language in minor literature comes

down to utility, though it sounds at times suspiciously close to style. The language of minor

literature is “a question of a becoming that includes the maximum difference as a difference of

intensity, the crossing of a barrier, a rising or a falling, a bending or an erecting, an accent on

the world” (TML, 22). This concept of intensification persists as “an asignifying intensive

utilization of a language” in which there is a particular development of intensives or tensors.

These “intensives” remain frustratingly underdefined, but perhaps that leaves another

interpretive berth. Deterritorialization here regards “the impossibility of not writing because

national consciousness, uncertain or oppressed, necessarily exists by means of literature,” and

minor literary language (such as Kafka’s Prague German) is “appropriate for strange and minor

uses” (TML, 16). But “national consciousness” needs be especially figurative here, capacious if

often inflexible, covering our letters and canons, but also who can use our bathrooms and who

is allowed to say what to whom, and when. One is perhaps conscious of the “nations” to which

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one belongs most acutely (only?) when one understands those whom national borders push

down upon or up against. These borders, well-guarded or wholly permeable, can just as well be

literary as literal, political as of policy, collecting as collective. This is one way to frame what

kind of intensives or tensors might mark minor literature: those which chart a course for where

language stops being representative in order to move towards its extremities or its limits (TML,

23), to find and investigate borders, boundaries, membranes. This notion of

(un)representativeness can be considered in its most radical form, to make the bridge to the

ensuing characteristics of minor literature stronger and more testable. Minoritarian subjects,

for Deleuze and Guattari, may have “their own ghetto territorialities,” but their value is as

“crystals of becoming” to “trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the

mean or majority” (TP, 106). The migrant is never the one to draw the black borderline on the

map. This becoming will be expressed in a variety of ways in the literature under consideration,

but, as a provocation: if gender is considered always a becoming and never a “having arrived”;

if there persists an ever-looming concern with passing or not passing, and what it means to

choose or be chosen for one or the other category, then becoming is both survival tactic and

overt defiance to the categorizing forces of State and Culture alike. Deleuze and Guattari

recognize this, somewhat, as they chart a deterritorialization “that will no longer be saved by

culture or by myth” (TML, 26).

Whereas major literature moves from content to expression, as the content must be in

some way broadly representative in order to persist as major, minor literature begins by

expressing “and doesn’t conceptualize until afterward” (ibid). Expression must break forms,

then reconstruct content. What this means for the novel, a few centuries into its development

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(and possibly its decrepitude), this study will attempt to outline. But the goals are clear: to

make “the world and its representation […] take flight” (TML, 46, authors’ emphasis). The

minor literature under consideration can take flight with representation as a countertactic, as

representation is often seen as a neoliberal conception of diversity’s bulwark against charges of

marginalization and divisiveness. Corporate feminism and Black exceptionalism1 are two

powerful contemporary examples of this: if we have a woman CEO of General Motors and a

Black president, how badly can we really be doing? How about a Black lesbian mayor of

America’s third-largest city, her role as blind police sympathizer and carceral shill

notwithstanding (or maybe it is withstanding: those both seem attractive to neoliberalism)? To

take flight with representation means deterritorializing both “being represented” as sufficient

condition and to wrest generic and media-based conventions of aesthetic representation from

calcified and canonical concerns. Deleuze and Guattari have certain thoughts on how this is

accomplished for minor literature; they write, “repression depends on the machine, and not

the other way around” (TML, 56). Taking flight does not mean escaping, more like absconding

with, which requires recognizing the machine to begin with, and confronting it in—if not on—its

own terms. On the other hand, “expression must sweep up content; the same process must

happen to form” (TML, 58). This almost malapropic dialectic, between repression and

expression, is more than a platitudinous paean to the power of the arts. It is instead a device

for conceptualizing the political capacities of literature—the minor literature machine “sweeps

up” both content and form in expression. Deleuze and Guattari offer a term for this sweeping

1 Pinkwashing would be a potential third, greenwashing/eco- or philanthro-capitalism a fourth, moral gentrification/respectability politics a fifth…the ability of a “free market” or laissez-faire structural adjustment of ideas allows neoliberalism to appropriate and refocus social justice concerns into marketable entities.

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up: “Antilyricism—‘grasp the world’ to make it take flight; instead of fleeing it, caress it” (TML,

60). Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari later leave some room for variation or oscillation,

stating that “maximum deterritorialization sometimes starts from a trait of content, and

sometimes from a trait of expression” (TP, 141). This is a bit of a mystification upon the earlier

sweeping up, forcing the reader to consider what might be a “trait of expression,” which sounds

suspiciously formalist. But here it worth remembering that deterritorialization is a matter of

language first, and a matter of adopting and appropriating, deforming and defaming, accepted

truths therein. They write, “it is within one’s own language that one is bilingual or

multilingual,” and as this study attempts to demonstrate, being multilingual is a form of

expression not limited to modalities of passing, but also to articulating history(s), considering

how one occupies time and durative boundaries and realizes their labor even when illegible or

unintelligible through the lenses or filters of capitalism’s heteronormativities. Here is another

place to emphasize, and not for the last time, a distinction between minoritarian and minority.

Whereas minoritarian is a motion of becoming and proceeds from deterritorialization, minority

is an aggregating function that in fact constitutes a reterritorialization. It is perhaps not

automatically a danger, this reterritorialization, but a reality which is omnipresent when

minoritarian might slip back into minority. Reterritorialization is the landing place for

representation, the giving up of the ghost of deterritorialization, the safer recline into the

leather couch of the Master’s epistemology.

Muñoz defines his titular concept early in Disidentifications as “descriptive of the

survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian

public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not

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conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (D, 4). The emphasis here appears to be

civic in nature; this is a nonnormativity suggested by citizenship. The bridge between

subjecthood and citizenship forces us to consider a majority/minority binary produced by the

state, and its twinned practices or policies of elision and punishment. The paradox of being at

once willfully oblivious and at the same time committedly carceral will reemerge in this study in

various treatments of the person of the sex worker, whom a coalition of Sex Work Exclusive

Radical Feminists2 and evangelicals/moral majoritarians attempt to write out of existence as

either victims or gender traitors, while the state and its violence workers seek to make

examples of or simply extinguish them. It is not insignificant that the term “subject,” rather

than “individual,” “person,” or, as elsewhere in the text, “queer,” reappears here. Nor is it for

nothing that the subject themselves3 are not the object of the ignorance or punishment, but

their existence is. This is one manifestation of the collectivity of minor literature: there are no

individual concerns, and what is visited upon one’s existence is guaranteed to be (continuously

potentially) similarly so upon another’s. But of course, Muñoz does not name the state as the

Master here, he instead cites a phobic public sphere4, which could manifest itself in any of the

triangles Deleuze and Guattari noted above. The exigency of disidentifications as survival

strategies suggests that, whether phantasmatic or not, normativity is so undesirable or

unavailable to minoritarian subjects that it is not worth seeking after, and so dangerous to be

2 Hereafter “SWERF.” 3 I’ll default to “them” as a third-person singular for those not explicitly designated otherwise in the texts they write or in which they appear. 4 “Majoritarian” is severed from “phobic public sphere” moving forward, as it is largely redundant in this inquiry.

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outside of that it may cost one their life. This is the Master that will kill to disallow

metamorphoses, after all.

Preciado offers one specific instantiation of disidentifying metamorphosis when he

notes that deadnames are the dominant culture’s attempt at “normalization,” whereas chosen

names mark “the beginning of a process of dissident subjectivation” (AU, 82). Choosing one’s

name(s) is not just part of the titular “crossing” of Preciado’s collection, it describes a “process

of disidentification” (ibid), one in a dissident series culminating in full-scale and complete

disobedience from the sex-gender systems and the Master’s maps. The concept of (perpetual)

process is one that unites not only Muñoz and Preciado, but perhaps this study as a whole.

Preciado later writes: “The process of expropriation and disidentification […] is what

retroactively characterizes these landscapes that are my own” (AU, 240). The expropriation is

piecemeal, non-teleological—there is no annex that is sufficient so long as the Master’s

cartography is at once indelible in the moment but always creeping towards some majoritarian

manifest destiny over the longue durée. When Preciado writes “I am a dissident of the sex-

gender system” (AU, 29), he combines Mai’s sense of the bound-but-separated nature of these

terms with Muñoz’s acceptance of content and refusal of terms/form. The retroactive nature

of the characterization is simply due to its following the Master’s “official” or even “natural”

categorization of territory and border. But how the landscapes become his own is a

combination of strategies of subject construction and occasional refusal to negotiate, to

debate, to equivocate, to come to false accord.

On the frequency of disidentification for minoritarian subjects, Muñoz writes: “to

perform queerness is to constantly disidentify, to constantly find oneself thriving on sites where

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meaning does not properly ‘line up’” (D, 78). So there is room to thrive, but it is through a de-

and re-stabilization of meaning, and one which ultimately has more to do with the self than the

social. Disidentification is both performative and tactical, a means to resist the

oppressive/normalizing discourse of dominant ideology, “reformatting of self within the social”

(ibid, 97). Muñoz here reminds us that to step outside the social would be a negative

identification and not a decoding. He uses another interesting formulation which will have

purchase later when considering how identity can function in fiction: disidentification as

interiorized passing. This concept has the twinge of self-labeling and the roots of modern

critical sociological theory, an area which scholars including Roderick Ferguson (2003) have

applied some pressure in excavating roots of contemporary race, gender, and sexuality

marginalization. But the flaw in labeling theory, which was recognized within a decade by one

of its great initial champions, Howard Becker, lay in its tendency to self-fulfillment.5 Perhaps

the same is true of self-labeling, but passing which is interiorized may not be the same as that

which is internalized. Furthermore, Muñoz notes that the self of disidentity is by nature an

“impersonal self” (D, 178, author’s emphasis), if not, as has been noted, a representative one.

Disidentification is a mode of performance—and here performance can be read with particular

latitude—remaking toxic identity by those who have been “hailed” by the identity, but are

unaware to “own such a label” (ibid, 185). The economic inflection of this sort of ownership is

perhaps worthy of remark: these toxic identities are certainly commodified, bought, and sold,

but also sanitized, integrated into other toxic identities, or denied wholesale (bad, counterfeit

5 See “Labelling Theory Reconsidered,” appended to Becker’s momentous (it was for some time the best-selling work of sociology in America) Outsiders (Simon & Shuster 1991 [essay added 1973, original edition 1963]).

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currencies). Persistence becomes a matter of management of a spoiled identity. But Muñoz

reads a performer such as Vaginal Davis, employing a disidentificatory hermeneutic, as

deterritorializing space and reoccupying it with the spoiled identity possessed by Black and

queer bodies (ibid, 120). This deterritorializing—slightly more literal in this instance, as Davis

smuggles in many of her performances in the drag of high artiste—is an instance of

disidentification “managing and negotiating historical trauma and systemic violence” (ibid,

161), each of which renders certain identities broken, irredeemable, and categorically illegible.

Managing or negotiating is one thing, but active resistance is another. Muñoz cites

disidentification as both hermeneutic—in the sense that it actively marks and mars that which

it reads and interprets—and possibility for freedom (ibid, 179). The performance of

disidentification disavows the majoritarian culture’s “real” (ibid, 196), which calls into question

the entire taxonomy that either “lines up” or does not with a subject’s experience within. Part

of the resistance to epistemology, as demonstrated shortly in the more recent work of Patricia

Hill Collins, is that knowledge-making tends to defer or even default to the Master’s codes. By

questioning cultural “reals,” disidentification takes on a performative rather than an

epistemological energy, deforming and re-forming the world, proliferating reals. There is more

than a little correspondence with Muñoz’s concept of ephemerality: when durative persistence

as marker of reality is called into question, many more reals become possible.

Of course, the Master’s real must be accounted for also. But oppositional decoding is

neither a positive nor even a negative identification, so if whiteness (or, more exactly, white

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supremacy), heteronormativity, and misogyny are performative projects6, than disidentification

is a counterperformativity (ibid, 199). For the purposes of minor literature and theorizing the

minoritarian, gender can be conceived of as a performative project in a simple sense, one which

allows for a counterperformative disidentification. Muñoz cites James Baldwin’s

disidentificatory practice as one extending to “ideological and structural grids that we come to

understand as genre” (ibid, 19). Is whiteness/white supremacy an ideological and structural

grid? To comprehend it likely requires three dimensions rather than two, having a length

across time, breadth across application, and depth through its rootedness and (often

devastating) hiddenness. Something similar could be said about class division under capitalism

and misogyny. But are any of these genres? Genre needs an antecedent, a possessive;

categories are “genres of.7” They all might be genres of Pêcheux’s subject construction, to

which one could good identify, bad identify, or disidentify. But there is the sense of something

unwitting, almost uncanny, and certainly situational in these sorts of identifications for

everyone, at least in degrees. Even in extreme instances of being subjectified by discrimination

(not only subject *to* discrimination), say, an internment camp or racialized forced

sterilization, how one identifies with or against the Master is not automatic. Muñoz’s example

of Baldwin (or Vaginal Davis, for that matter) suggests that disidentification, through literature,

6 An instructive example: the coding of “white privilege” when “white supremacy” would be a more fitting marker. There is no particular privilege to being able to storm the US Capitol building, as people of color are not lining up to do the same. Privilege is at best subconsciously performed; supremacy is enacted, wielded, and used to bend the real to a specific will. No form of identitarian privilege explains the whiteness of mass shooters or the odds of their remaining alive in interactions with authority—there is no parallel act or treatment within people of color to even compare. It’s the assumption, propagation, and reinforcement of white supremacy, from individual to system and back again, that explains the persistence of these tragedies. 7 And, as has been noted above, genre is delimited and disidentified with throughout even the small sampling of minoritarian novels in this study.

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has a distinctive character to it. Muñoz suggests that disidentifications are often about

recycling, which is not automatically adequate to the survival needs of the minoritarian subject.

But there is room for both disidentification and resistance which is “pronounced and direct”

(ibid, 5), within, outside, and straddling the borders of the dominant public spheres. In

Baldwin’s case, this means fiction becoming “a contested field of self-production” (ibid, 19). In

this capacity, fiction is uniquely suited for a disidentificatory project such as this study. Minor

literature is the field of self-production in which disidentification is the im/personal

deterritorialization par excellence.

Epistemic Resistance as Deterritorializing Force

The concept of epistemic resistance is steeped in Black feminist thinking. Patricia Hill

Collins (2019) positions what it is one might resist in terms which link back to minor literature:

“epistemic power is part of how domination operates” (Intersectionality as Critical Theory, 122).

As such, engaging in epistemic resistance is important for political resistance (ibid, 126), as it

attempts to defy hegemonic control over knowledge production. Power here can and should

be read as violence, and Collins details two forms of epistemic violence used to suppress

subordinated8 people (ibid, 133). These include testimonial quieting, defined as ignoring or not

giving audience to the minoritarian subject, and testimonial smothering, defined as internal

self-censorship. Attempting to correspond these with Muñoz, the former might be labeled

elision and the latter punishment, but that may not quite capture the vocality of Collins’s

8 Refer to a variety of terms used above, without necessarily equivocating around them: toxic, polluted, minoritarian, marginalized, elided, et al.

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concepts. Quieting is certainly punitive, but it implies that there is a (likely dissenting) voice to

be quieted to begin with. It requires recognition from the Master that the minoritarian subject

is dangerous/vocal/legible enough, and their message is perhaps sufficiently efficacious, that it

is worthy of active suppression. Smothering, on the other hand, is perhaps best seen as a

survival strategy (or tactic, to use earlier language) based on the recognition that one cannot be

heard or registered within the majoritarian codes.

One form of epistemic resistance on which Collins expends some effort is standpoint

epistemology, which she suggests “defends the integrity of individuals and groups in

interpreting their own experiences” (ibid, 136). Integrity here perhaps hews closest to the root

meaning of the word: individual testimony and interpretation, and especially those from

minoritarian standpoints, are integral to understanding their experiences. It feels almost

tautological to write that statement, but Collins is responding to a generation of attacks against

identity politics which write off individual experience as pluralistic and somehow less rigorous

than the purportedly objective standards of institutionalized epistemology. These are political

claims in the form of experience, or “seeing one’s own knowledge as situated within social

contexts” (ibid, 139). The situatedness of this knowledge is what divides it from epistemology

as judge, jury, and executioner for knowledge-making and verifying. Perhaps even verifiability

comes under fire, as the method here is listening/reading and proceeding from belief, rather

than control in the guise of empiricism. What supplants verifiability is collectivity, as advancing

“resistant knowledge projects”—a phrase eerily similar to one addressed in Muñoz, later—

requires epistemic resistance as a collective undertaking (ibid, 136). Thus, “claiming a situated

standpoint” is a form of epistemic resistance (ibid, 139), and one which “can democratize the

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process of doing social theory.” It is worth underlining the bluntness of word choice here: what

does it mean to “do social theory”? This broadest possible active verb calls back to the

democratization referred to before it: critical social theory is built, performed, applied,

institutionalized, codified, calcified, but can also be deformed, mutated, transformed, redacted,

and discarded. “Doing it” could mean embodying it just as soon as practicing it, and, given

Collins’s interest in the pitfalls of methodology as another institutionalized and thus

potentially/likely exclusionary construction, doing might be closer to direct action than

observation, codification, publication, and the rest of the -ation cyclicality of the Academy. In

any case, standpoint epistemology in certain ways bears little resemblance to Epistemology, as

the former is not a theory of truth, but a recognition of the “significance of power relations in

producing knowledge” (ibid, 140). This is because situated standpoints are “not amenable to

dominant group appropriation or control,” and thus the Master’s response is borne out of

Muñoz’s elision and punishment, the perfect (and perfectly despicable) hybrid: discreditation.

It makes for a nefarious triangle, and one which casts epistemological projects in a different

light. The dominant group (read: majoritarian community; phobic public sphere; Master) must

either appropriate—which feels like the most (neo)liberal political option—control—which is

the method of the carceral state and disciplinary knowledge-building institutions and

practices—or else discredit—which is on the one hand no more necessarily difficult than the

other options, but on the other the most wasteful of the three. Even within a neoliberal

reliance on markets and philanthrocapitalism9 as arbiters of morality, waste needs to be

9 A term which has special traction within the world of food justice and the neoliberal panacea of structural adjustment, a concept that, somewhat shockingly, actually has appeared in some of the critical work used for this

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hidden, repurposed, or rationalized, and the “market of ideas” (a gross phrase in all senses) is

no different. To discredit is to exclude from categories of meaning- or truth-making, not simply

to suggest that a standpoint does not “measure up.” As such, Collins suggests that minoritarian

populations must strive to be agents rather than objects of knowledge, a unique burden

presumably not shared by majoritarian subjects (ibid, 141, author’s emphasis). Of course, using

a cipher from earlier, the opposite of agent might equally well be subject, suggesting a

collapsing or even equivocation of subject and object when it comes to epistemology. So

epistemic resistance is resisting epistemology whilst recognizing that minoritarian communities

and, indeed, in a third sense, subjects do make meaning and produce knowledges via practices

such as standpoint epistemology.

Of What Territory and the Circuitry of De/reterritorialization

There are at least two ways in which this study does not seek to deploy

deterritorialization as regards trans minor literature. The first is as a simplification: that gender

is the territory, and the existence of trans people and trans art proves it can be transgressed. In

refusing to accept the first part of this causal structure—that gender is grounded in such a way

that it is deterritorialized by the existence of those who confound a binary conception

thereof—the second, regarding proof of transgress-ability, does not bear comment here. If

nothing else, thinking of gender this way in terms of literary production confuses whether it is

the deterritorializing or reterritorializing force—it may be either under various conditions, but it

study. The invisible hand is rendered all-too-real under the auspices of (forced) participation in markets as ransom for foreign aid.

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cannot be both at once. Obviously plenty of trans literature might self-consciously elucidate

gender transgression, and plenty might not, and it isn’t for this study to pass judgment on

whether or the extent to which they do or do not. Thus, deterritorialization ought to never, by

design or by accident, mean genderfuck10; that happens as much in the eye of the beholder as

the intention of the beheld, even as each conditions the other. Gayle Salamon (2010) writes:

“recognizing that movement is possible across the borders of male and female means that the

bodily envelope cannot only be understood as the symbolic marker of the absolute otherness

of sexual difference,” (AB, 143) and it is just this bodily—or boditarian—nature which is an

invitation to lazy analysis, using the “bad kind” of identity politics and assumptions about

authorial attention. When Wendy dreams that “a man had gotten into her” in Casey Plett’s

Little Fish (LF, 191), the reader takes her at her word; there’s no metaphor at hand and gender

surely isn’t being deterritorialized in her dreamt embodiment. Thus is it only right that “she

pulled him out” (ibid). What is deterritorialized and reterritorialized is not gender itself, as

construct, as embodiment, as performance, as ideal, as security, as enemy. Juliana Huxtable

suggests trans women have “been exported as symbols enunciated in the reflections between

the trenches of Pornhub and the pathetic, desperate tremble of Antony11 as she sang ‘You Are

My Sister’” (MPG, 39). This “exported as” is a symbolic violence that removes both the agency

of the trans sex worker/performer whose labor is stolen by the “hub” sites and the artist who

ventures a version of solidarity borne of similarity and hurt. When Anhoni sings, “there’s

10 See Christopher Lonc “Genderfuck and Its Delights” in Gay Sunshine, Spring 1974, No. 21 for an early accounting of the term. 11 Now Anhoni, though Huxtable applies the feminine pronouns perhaps before Anhoni herself had! The “Johnsons” of Anhoni’s backing group of this time refer to Marsha P Johnson, icon of Stonewall and trans sex worker of color, cofounder of STAR house, and all-around bastion of positive imagination.

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nothing left to gain from remembering,” she does not suggest that we don’t remember anyway,

and a more compelling deterritorialization of this lyric and the album on which it appears is that

of family and the literal taking flight of its title and title track, I Am A Bird Now.12 The point is,

as this study trawls through a range of specific instances of deterritorialization, they will neither

be anchored nor elevated by gender transgression as territory.

The second bad way is deterritorialization as mystification, attempting to use the former

as a master concept to unify otherwise seemingly unrelated characteristics of a set of literary

works. Deterritorialization is in fact most effective in this study to the extent that it allows us to

move from queer theory to trans literature without defaulting to either carving out space in the

former for the latter (that would truly be a reterritorializing gesture), or claiming the latter as

an appendage or extension of the former (though this rather colonial gesture has been

attempted; Transsexual Empire,13 indeed). There may well be a border war between queer and

trans thought, but regardless of how partisan one’s perspective may be, the metaphors one

chooses or avoids in considering transgender subject position matters: it’s fun to say everyone

is trans, as it shocks the TERFs and family values crowds alike. But clearly the experience of a

trans woman is not de facto identical to that of a cis woman, not to say that the experience of

one trans woman is the same as another. When this non-analogy is moved into the

experiences of trans men, it may resemble Halberstam’s “border wars” between butch and

12 This study largely doe not open onto music, but Anhoni is an interesting case as she is as much performance and video artist, and feminist commentator, as pop musician, and in fact has given up the latter. She’s written and spoken on her “future feminism” concept enough to constitute a citable, critical voice outside of her music and gallery art shows alone. 13 It’s a cheeky reference, but one upon which I could expand. It’s almost cliche at this point to mention the Janice Raymond book of this title, and I do not mean to make an obsolete straw man of it here, but the TERF thinking that stems from it remains entirely alive and gnashing.

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trans, and when it is triangulated with non-binary and GNC folks, well, it’s either a vast universe

or a swamp, depending on where one is standing. The metaphor of a spectrum has its issues

(e.g. explicitly binary poles), fluidity is imperfect as well (as some folks do fight for their place at

one of the perceived/experienced poles)… This is all to say that deterritorialization need neither

complicate nor answer these questions, and this study is not predicated on planting its own

meaningless flag in the sand on these matters. Similarly, this study has no stake in labeling a

trans community, let alone a minority one. But minor literature can identify one or more

minoritarian subject positions, (anti-)epistemologies, ontologies; truths exist within, between,

and around trans subjects positions in these novels. So, after a deep breath, a few words on

queerness as site, subject position, territory.

When Kai Cheng Thom’s narrator cites the “very old archetype” into which trans girl

stories are put (FF, 2), that the rewards of transition are “that you get to be like everybody else

who is white and rich and boring,” she clearly wants her own story to defy that archetype.

There is nothing to borrow from that story; instead, the very notion that there is “a story” to be

told in different iterations, painting with slightly different palettes, is not just incorrect, it is

revolting. This is not crude individualism, it is resistance to a variety of oppression distinct from

the marker on the bathroom one is permitted to enter or whom they can marry; it is the right

to tell the wrong story. Maria Griffiths, the trans femme heroine of Imogen Binnie’s Nevada

knows that “the self-sufficient loner” is “some straight dude bullshit” (N, 37), and that it is thus

somehow not her story to embody. That said, bullshit or not, she is, upon her breakup, a

(relatively; she is in a stolen car with a sock full of stolen drugs) self-sufficient loner, driving

across the country for weeks on her own with enough heroin for a lengthy bender, and she is

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certainly not by any stretch of the heroic masculine imagination “some straight dude.” Thom

alludes to the kind of taking flight that employing modular fat and thin aesthetics can promote,

as she suggests that truth or falsity doesn’t matter, only “the story itself: what kinds of doors it

opens, what kinds of dreams it brings” (FF, 187). In another context, this idea might be slated

as pure fancy, but to emphasize elements of narrative other than veracity perhaps draws a

thicker line between memoir and fiction, one that is more decisive for minor literatures than

majoritarian. As noted above, the autobiographical pact binds the author to the curiosities and

voyeuristic impulses of phobic publics; it ironically offers a further level of remove in its

“realness.” For minor literature, the territory of the novel opens a different set of doors for

deterritorialization (be they authotheoretical or not) at this stage in its history. Thom’s title

gives pride of place to “Notorious Liars,” not least her narrator, after all. Jordy Rosenberg goes

a bit further in Confessions of a Fox, in the sense that he casts doubt on any strict line between

facticity/verifiability and verisimilitude/truth. Discovering that the protagonist of his found

account was trans is the first revelation of the novel, but this somewhat buries the lede: the

entirety of the supposedly historical account has (possibly) been “edited” or altered by a group

of radical archivists, The Stretchers. As evidence of this: one of the quack pseudoscientists of

the pre-Victorian London of Fox relates what he takes to be the fable of a trans woman and her

“great love story,” on which he opines: “our world offers nothing of these redemptive

possibilities” (CF, 266). The character in the story, which may or may not be emended,

editorializes about the unlikelihood of trans redemption in the world in which he operates. The

speed of deterritorialization careens forth at breakneck after the discovery of potential

posthumous editing, casting a variety of the previous inclusions at which Rosenberg’s Voth

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simply marveled upon first reading in a different light, and lending him the boldness to create a

couple of his own choice edits. The first of these is quenching the publisher’s voyeuristic fervor

for an illustration of what may be Jack Sheppard’s intersex genitalia—which Voth assumes has

been tastefully replaced with a marbled page a la Tristram Shandy—by emailing an image of a

“waterlogged slug” (CF, n272) in its place. The deterritorialization at work is one of willful lying,

elision, and self-protective mutation of facts. It is not as simple as denial or deemphasis, it is

replacement, and in this way mirrors the political project of prison and police abolition. Tearing

down is well and good, but if there is nothing to replace oppressive systems, then something

worse may fill the vacuum in their stead, reterritorializing both the rhetoric and power of their

removal.14

Paraphrasing Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Muñoz marks the collapsing of territory and

semiotic: “probably any sexuality is a matter of sorting, displacing, reassigning singleness or

plurality, literality or figurativeness to a very limited number of sites or signifiers” (CU, 197). In

this specific sense, queer theory simply will not do, as it almost mandates the subsumption of

trans into queer. Halberstam writes of a queer geography (or perhaps a queered geography) in

which body-centered identity gives way to “sexual subjectivities within and between

embodiment, place, and practice” (QTP, 5). Again, the prepositions are the key: to be both or

14 “Abolition” is a particularly interesting case for this: what begins as a movement to end chattel slavery is reappropriated by “New Jim Crow” (see the Michelle Alexander book of this title) thinking regarding prisons and police, but also, more nefariously, by anti-prostitution advocates, for whom abolition means the “end demand” model of abolishing sex work. This last recycling is particularly violent, a rhetorical trick which has been reproduced in political rhetoric around “defunding” police (often nothing more than a shell game, moving funding lines from one branch of state violence work to another) or “decriminalizing” sex work (which, when emerging from the mouths of those implicated in the neoliberal criminal legal system such as Kamala Harris, actually means Nordic model legalization). The trajectory of abolition’s political charge and praxes would be ironic were it not so grisly: from ending the classification of people as chattel to attempting to criminalize survival out of existence.

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either within/between as the site of subjectivity/subjectification/subjecthood is to

deterritorialize subject position altogether. When Muñoz writes of the minoritarian as those

“debased” within the public sphere, he thinks this debasement leaves the subject and their

community(s) with a stark choice. One can accept loss, which he suggests is to accept

queerness rendering one lost to a world of heterosexual imperatives/codes/laws (CU, 73), and

these strictures would of course apply—possibly analogously-but-equally—to trans subjects as

well. But while he distances himself in many ways from Lee Edelman’s No Future invective-

imperative, perhaps Muñoz might concur that queerness “should and must” redefine

civilization “through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the reproduction of futurity” (NF,

17), as that reproduced future is white, heteronormative, ableist, and bourgeois. While Muñoz

sees this loss as relinquishing the role and privilege of a heteronormative order, Edelman

prefers to resist and drop out of it altogether. The border here is between devaluing the future

as the future of the child, and committing oneself to a utopic vision of what might come with

sufficient imagination and effort. These two need not be mutually exclusive impulses.

Pessimism can instead be deterritorialized from progressivist/evolutionary normative models to

suggest that we should be pessimistic about the carceral projects of the state for fear of falling

into reformist traps of perpetual change being the same as positive change. Edelman’s childless

non-future could still admit of Muñoz’s concern that “minoritarian subjects are cast as hopeless

in a world without utopia” (CU, 97). This world is, as constituted, without utopia, and requires

Muñoz’s “denaturalization of the world itself” in favor of what he codes as utopian

performativity. The novel is a machine of potential utopia, and minor literature carries as part

of its political onus a horizonal impetus. As Muñoz puts it, hope is necessary “in the face of

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identity knowledges” as those knowledges attempt to render the minoritarian as strictly

minority, or else erase distinction altogether. He instead champions “minoritarian knowledge

projects,” some of which have already been detailed here, and he names specifically among

them Jack Halberstam’s concept of female masculinities. After Muñoz’s death, Halberstam

published another sort of minoritarian knowledge project, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account

of Gender Variability. In this more recent work, Halberstam uses the “*” as one does a wildcard

in a search engine. As Halberstam has written extensively about naming, this device is not

altogether surprising, though its precise purpose is more than allowing for flexibility between

all of the “transes” which could be denoted by the asterisk: transgender, transsexual,

transvestite, transgression…they read like a reverse history of a set of minoritarian subject

positions.

In Casey Plett’s Little Fish, Sophie, perhaps the most reflective of the trans women in the

narrative, paraphrases Morgan M. Page, who writes that she will only use the term

“transsexual,” never “transgender,” as she “earned all those syllables” (LF, 146) Halberstam

wants his own designation to pull even more heft: “the term ‘trans*’ puts pressure on all

modes of gendered embodiment and refuses to choose between the identitarian and the

contingent forms of trans identity” (T*, xiii). The term becomes a counter-nominal device,

deterritorializing the act of naming by naming the non-name, electing not to complete it; trans*

“holds open the meaning of the term ‘trans’ and refuses to deliver certainty through the act of

naming” (T*, 7). The concept develops out of care to (unnecessarily) avoid stabilizing

fluctuations in meaning. More importantly, at least for the work of minor literature, trans* is a

taking flight, a notice of “the fabulous, inventive, dis-identificatory processes by which and

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through which trans* people dream themselves into the world and remake the world in the

process” (T*, 44). The novels under consideration are rife with this “dreaming into” the world,

while being particularly self-conscious of it; a world that fetishizes gender normativity as it

“reads” bodies in all the public spheres previously noted. Halberstam is wary of what it means

to confirm or even acknowledge a “nonnormative” label: “seeing trans* bodies […] not simply

as trans bodies that provide an image of the nonnormative against which normative bodies can

be discerned, but as bodies that are fragmentary and internally contradictory, bodies that

remap gender and its relations to race, place, class, and sexuality, bodies that are in pain” (T*,

89). This remapping is a minor literary commitment, and brings this study full circle to borders

as the premium spatial metaphor (for better or for worse) for “reading” gendered experience.

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Chapter 2

Everything is Political

As if it wasn’t already, one might rejoin. But political here takes on a distinct sense of

collectivity which is not accessible in the same way to majoritarian literatures. Deleuze and

Guattari rely on a few different apparent metaphors or abstractions, which, upon closer

inspection, may not be so metaphorical or abstract at all. The first is spatial: the “cramped

space” in which minor literature is produced forces “individual intrigue” to connect to politics.

This is not to say that minor literature toils under the requirement of representativeness for its

constitutive populations—if anything, perhaps the opposite. The individual experience is

cramped by both expectations placed upon the population writing and the necessary proximity

(whether literal or perceptual) to others within it. This proximity can be a matter of affinity or

survival, and it may be from within (as in kinship groups) or from without (potentially erroneous

assumptions regarding category similarities within a population by outside observers). When

Deleuze and Guattari make their offhand remarks regarding the potential application of minor

literary language to “blacks in America,” (TML, 26) they are assigning minoritarian status via the

latter category. The concept of minor literature in this study is built on the back of nothing but

the trans novels themselves, the obverse of the Deleuze and Guattari, extrapolate-from-Kafka

method.

The next construct is familial. The “family triangle” connects to triangles commercial,

economic, bureaucratic, and juridical “that determine its values” (TML, 17). The value of family

is under constant scrutiny in minor literatures precisely because commercial, economic,

bureaucratic and juridical triangles devalue, debase, or ignore minoritarian subjects. From the

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edifices which make up carceral, medical, and academic industrial complexes to socio-cultural

values that are often determined in negative relation to minoritarian subject positions (i.e. how

white, straight, wealthy, cis-gendered, safe, and stable one’s life is), the heteronormative

nuclear family, with amatively-bonded coupling and state-sanctioned economic codependence,

looms ubiquitous, perhaps especially so in North America. Minor literature ought to be a locale

in which these triangles are disentangled and their geometry tested, which leads us to the third

construct.

The plans have already been laid for the concept of minor literature as machine, but

here they can be refined to specify that machine as one of experimentation. As previously, it is

easy to argue that the novel as a form is inherently experimental, but that argument gets more

difficult to support with each passing generation that stakes its claim that the novel, or even

literature, for which the novel has arguably become the shorthand, is dead.1 In this instance,

Deleuze and Guattari want to instill what this study reads as revolutionary potential in minor

literature, a horizonal politics which is always seeking-after. Paul B Preciado codes this

potential according to trans-becoming, a taking flight of just the sort to which this minor

literature commits: “The revolution (yours, ours) is always a trans-becoming: it’s a matter of

mobilizing a state of existing things to lead them to another state, one known to desire alone”

(AU, 166). This is very much a deterritorialization, of both form and content; the formal

innovation and what this study reads as experimentation is very much a mobilization towards a

1 See for instance Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? or the readings of Hegel’s and Arthur Danto’s end of art proclamations in Francesco Campana’s The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel. On a broader level, the TSQ issue on trans studies referenced elsewhere in this study is in part a response to claims that trans studies is “over” or else never really existed.

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horizon of minoritarian self-determination. As Preciado continues, emphasizing this

horizonality, “the revolution has no finality apart from the process of transformation it

experiments with” (AU, 168).

When Angela Davis suggests that all prisoners are political prisoners2, and that there is

no revolutionary politics (and she was of course speaking explicitly about Black nationalist

movements) without considering “third world” political struggles in solidarity, she is suggesting

a similar sort of collectivity. Deleuze and Guattari write that the minor literary reader must

count on a literary machine “that will anticipate the precipitations, that will overcome diabolical

powers before they become established” (TML, 59). This sounds lofty and perhaps it is, but

erring on the side of loftiness is a risk worth taking when considering how entrenched and

motivated these diabolical powers are. This machine is one of neither interpretation nor social

representation, but an experiment, a socio-political investigation (TML, 49), and with any luck, a

reading practice that that helps us learn “how to create a becoming-minor” (TML, 42). This

becoming-minor is another curious feature, but one that is again instructive of the distinction

between minority and minoritarian. The former, as content, is measured quite differently from

the latter, as expression. Minoritarian perspective, read through minor literature, is an

expression of criticism, “a micro-politics, a politics of desire that questions all situations” (TML,

42). This is to say, being apolitical and uncritical is a politics, and it is always the wrong one.

Deleuze and Guattari are well-aware of the power and dangerousness of non-critique, and

especially in the art of the minoritarian. This motivates the relationship of minoritarian to

majoritarian politics via the concept of enantiomorphosis: “a regime that involves a hieratic and

2 See “Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation” in If They Come in the Morning… (2016 [1971]).

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immutable Master who at every moment legislates by contrasts, prohibiting or strictly limiting

metamorphoses, giving figures clear and stable contours, setting form in opposition two by two

and requiring subjects to die in order to pass from one form to the other” (TML, 107). A

strange locale, in the center of a book ostensibly about Franz Kafka by a post-structuralist

metaphysician and a queer commie psychoanalyst, to find a description of transgender

marginalization and repression today. What is hieratic is not so much organized religion itself,

which has an at-best variable impact on the day-to-day existence of the minoritarian subject in

North America today, but the fervor and conviction with which heteronormative binarism is

preached and emblematized in so many facets of civilization. The legislating by contrasts is a

beautiful turn as well, as the very notion of cis v trans requires a legislator to offer the label of

“trans” to begin with; trans deterritorializes cis, which in turn reterritoritorializes trans. Of

course this Master must curtail metamorphoses—the coincidence of the English name of

Kafka’s most enduring tale should not be overlooked—those same governing triangles have

room only for the illusory goal of change, not change in reality. It is Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s

distinction between reformist reforms—those which stand in the way of true change, in her

case, prison abolition—and anti-reformist reforms—those which reduce harm and do not serve

as a self-indemnifying mechanism for the Master’s systems to persist.3 Even more damning are

clear and stable contours, not solely due to a fetish for mutability and fungibility, opacity and

instability, but due to who is deciding what is clear and what is stable. The state’s obsession

with marriage and heterosexual or heteronormative coupling is proof positive of this kind of

stability. For all the ways in which gay marriage is seen as a panegyric for oppressions past (and

3 See Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2018).

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future), stability in the enemy of a certain, wide stripe of queerness, and an even wider one of

transness. Form does indeed become strictly opposition, binarized, made diametric when

seemingly unnecessary. But direst of all, and what this minor literature is most tasked with

unmasking and defying, is the charge to die in order to change (or rather than changing) form.

The choice of noun—“subjects”—carries with it the charge of requiring an antecedent. The

Master is the assumptive subjectifier, but how and why remains in question. Minor literature

reveals much about political motivations from the perspective of the subjectified, and

becoming-minor means turning this subjectification into a weapon, the next element of the

machine.

The Political is Personal

None of these are political novels, which is to say, all of these are political novels. There

are various asides and witty barbs at leftist political formations, and occasional reflections on

where characters find themselves situated under medical and legal industrial complexes, or

otherwise in the eyes of the state, but very little in the way of direct political enthusiasm, save

for a few important exceptions. But such direct statements are not minor literature’s comment

on the political nature of the aesthetic work; in fact, it almost works better to evaluate the

politics of novels in the absence of explicit reference to the political affiliations or deeply-held

principles of the characters within. The politics of minor literature are always communitarian,

which in part means they speculate on different community formations and allegiances. It is, as

such, a depersonalized personal that drives a minoritarian political ethos.

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When David Valentine attempts to “imagine transgender,” his project really seems to

wonder about the bagginess of the category altogether: what is its collective value, and

does/can it represent the interests of those who either align themselves or are otherwise

aligned under it? Put another way, he asks: how useful is a politics that seeks to represent

those who reject the category into which they are included? (Imagining Transgender, 227).

There is an analogous question for sex work, an industry comprised of trades

disproportionately representing trans people, and which has struggled at various moments in

the political history of this country4 to comprise its labor power as a category of worker. But

Valentine answers the question himself: “the value of a category like transgender to make

claims against violators is substantial” (ibid, 227). It is not purely semantic to rejoin: is there a

category “like transgender”? Riki Anne Wilchins returns to that chimeric notion of

“naturalness” as she notes “trans identity is not a natural fact. Rather it is the political category

we are forced to occupy when we do certain things with our bodies” (Read My Lips, 25). It is

one thing to be forced to occupy a category—one can think again of Little Fish’s Sophie’s

perhaps tongue-in-cheek desire to hold onto “transsexual” in all its syllabic glory—but it is

another to hold a minoritarian subject position as a means of commanding one’s body. There is

something magnanimous in Wilchins’ further proposal that “maybe for political purposes I’m

whoever is unrepresented, whoever is standing alone in a room” (ibid, 185). The minoritarian

“flexibility” to inhabit the lonely subject position is both anti-categorical and the height of a

4 Though it is worth noting that mass movements of sex working people have been far more successful in Brazil, India, China, and the UK, as well as the decriminalization of sex work in New Zealand as a result of activism. The difficulties in the US may say more about the state of organized labor and rock-ribbed racism and misogyny than anything specific about national efforts at organizing in the trades.

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certain variety of solidarity. It harmonizes with Muñoz’s “anti-identitarian identity politics,”

which dictate that commonality is forged not through shared images and fixed identifications,

but fashioned from “connotive images that invoke communal structures of feelings” (D, 176).

The ties that bind are affective and experiential, and render self-contradictory any feminist

politics that excludes trans women, as well as deflate any sui generis assumptions of identity.

David Valentine worries that bad identity politics can produce “apparent unintelligibility” and

erase analyses of underlying inequality (Imagining Transgender, 112). This could be read as:

when one bases ethical presumptions and motivations on an externally imbricated identity,

they will be unable (or unwilling?) to read any conflictual representations thereof, apace with

Sara Ahmed’s suggestion that gender difference is the only means of gender self-identification

in a heteronormative world. Valentine suggests that the category of transgender is an effect of

distinction between sexuality and gender in contemporary politics/theory/service provision,

which is in fact accomplished through homonormativity and emergent from the presumed-

autonomous sphere of gender (ibid, 132). This contention arises in no small part from

Valentine’s field work and activism, witnessing differential treatment of queer and trans folks at

service providers in lower Manhattan. Setting aside homonormativity for the moment, this

presumed-autonomy pulls at the seams of a minoritarian politics, in that if it is upheld, it

threatens to dissolve queer and trans solidarity altogether. Without passing judgment on the

effect of this severing (and indeed judging the extent to which it has already occurred in various

spheres!), this study again places a signpost for an impending discussion of sex-gender, and

what it means to not leave gender as an autonomous sphere.

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But this is all to dance around the great political trap: representation. As Elizabeth

Grosz (2005) writes, if politics is naught but a struggle for recognition or identity, then it is

“fundamentally servile” (Time Travels, 194). Instead, Grosz suggests a “politics of

imperceptibility,” never identifiable with a person, group, or organization. This anti-identitarian

identity is that of the activist, whose structure of feeling is based around liberation and

overcoming—rather than being burdened with “fixing”—the phobic public sphere. The Master

is never going to willingly act against his class position. Furthermore, as Valentine asks, if the

logic of representation in a “politics of recognition” requires a stable identity (i.e. one

identifiable with a person/group/organization), will it lead to a political movement which

assumes whiteness and middle-class respectability? (Imagining Transgender, 250). He thinks it

likely will—and thus the minor literary politics built up to this point ought not to be a politics of

recognition—and leaves room for “unstable” minoritarian identities. Muñoz suggests that

gender, queer, and/or race critique “thrives on an incommensurability, a false symmetry

between itself and the social movements it purports to mirror” (CU, 208), and, in line with this

thriving, minor literature need not itself be a social movement, even as it constantly stakes

political claims. What this literature has to say about time, identity, and labor is shot through

with a resistant, deterritorializing politics, and one which corresponds with prison/police

abolition and anti-capitalism, sometimes in spite of the content of its themes and narrative

arcs.

Jack Halberstam has a particular political bent in mind for his trans* concept which

fulfills the charge of resisting fixed identity recognition. “Trans* marks a politics based on a

general instability of identity and oriented toward social transformation, not political

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accommodation” (T*, 50), and the politics being accommodated here would be those of

neoliberal inclusion. Further, transgender can be seen as “the newest marker of exclusion and

pathology to be seamlessly transitioned into a template for acceptance and tolerance” (T*, 46).

Halberstam can be read as suggesting that this template is at best hollow, and perhaps

something nastier in its minoritizing, as “new modes of acceptance [are] extended only to

forms of transgender embodiment that could be easily identified with new markets for capital”

(T*, 49). The great swallowing up of capitalist, neoliberal logic—be it via pinkwashing or

internal division and exclusion—is a machine which has a relatively clear, if mutable, setting on

its “tolerance” dial. Halberstam sees the “*” as tugging at a variety of (perceived and enacted)

binaries emic to the phobic public spheres: “by naming” the space between legal/illegal,

man/woman, citizen/foreigner as “trans*, we begin to see the importance of mutual

articulations of race, nation, migration, and sexuality” (T*, 40). Mutual articulation is the

content of Bakhtin’s conception of the novel; heteroglossia allows for intersections and

disjuncture to form a framework of resistance for minor literature. The spaces between are

those in which the vernacular of the minoritarian subject begins the remapping of minor

language and taking flight with form.

Still, there is a certain itchiness to political formulations within the fiction itself. In Paul

Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Paul keeps a mental fashion log of his professors, in which

“Marxists or queers in any period shot to the top” (PMG, 19), suggesting that looking good in

the academy is aided by a certain political bent. Paul’s gaze is partisan as well: “as a matter of

principle (feminist, queer, anti-phony, anti-bourgeois), Paul stared” (PMG, 38). Paul comports

himself to the world by penetrating the people around him with his knowing and studied stare,

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and asserts as a kind of right of self-determination his predilection for summary analysis.

Staring in cities, which is where Paul is generally to be found, at moments breaks or upholds

social contracts between urban dwellers. A feminist stare could mean a number of things, but

an anti-phony stare has the singular purpose of deciding who is phony and who is not, and

covering either of them with one’s gaze. It would certainly be the odd man out in the list,

unless passing itself is political, and authenticity aligns with feminist, queer, and anti-capitalist

horizons. Anti-phoniness as (personal) political revolutionary ethos.

Maria Griffiths embodies something more akin to a set of ethical precepts around

transness than a direct political ethos in Nevada. She muses that trans men sometimes “come

out of radical activist dyke communities where having a punk rock gender is kind of like, chic, or

whatever” (N, 25). Jack Halberstam notes a “curious desire” to always connect gay sex to

radicalism (QF, 151), though in this instance in Nevada, perhaps it’s connecting radicalism to

gay sex. Maria is ostensibly apolitical in the novel—which, as noted above is itself a politics—

but in the litany of irritations she presents her ex-girlfriend, it is the perceived lack of necessary

resistance which most rankles Steph. Steph finds that Maria’s “punk rock ethics are vague and

privileged holdovers from the straight white boy outsider stance she took for the first chunk of

her life, and they’ve never been challenged or put to the test” (N, 119). The form of this

possible test of ethics remains mysterious, and in the course of the novel it is perhaps Maria

herself who does most of the testing.

Of the novels at hand, perhaps only Confessions of the Fox could be considered overtly

political, and even that is somewhat in spite of its trans protagonist, Jack Sheppard. Bess, the

sex working, romantic partner-in-crime, is the political heart of Rosenberg’s novel, though the

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ostensible narrator, Voth, espouses political ideology in the footnotes as well. At the height of

the increased corporal presence in the city, Bess thunders that the “plague’s an excuse they’re

using to police us further!” constituting “a securitizational furor” (CF, 117), and the “so-called

plague’s a colonial furor too” (CF, 119). Gender presentation is certainly such an excuse as well,

but it solicits a furor that interests Jack only at the most personal level—as a trans man and

thief. The central political hinge of the novel, though, is Voth’s realization that the Stretchers

have been emending and appending works such as the manuscript of Jack’s history for decades,

at least. When he writes that “no one escapes capitalism’s clutches alone” (CF, n279), he does

not mean simply Jack and Bess and their associates needing one another, he is directly

addressing and thus implicating the reader. Minor literature here (and, really, in each of the

novels) is heavily predicated on direct address; that is part of the way in which everything

within takes on a political character. As Voth’s own furor is whipped up, he writes about

carceral queers (CF, n294) who are the vanguard, perhaps sometimes hidden in history and

requiring the Stretchers to return them to fore, other times needing to remain hidden to be

effective. Voth invokes this sense of communitarianism—read: minoritarianism—with an oft-

paraphrased platitude: “none of us will be free unless all of us are free.” Freedom means

abolition, destroying the “Masters” (ibid, author’s capitalization) and the system(s) that “began

with the police and the Royal Navy.”5 But the revolutionary sentiment does not end there.

Revolutionary politics here are something more than recognition of one’s own subject position

or identity, and deeper than having those be represented or even respected, whatever that

5 See for example Captive Genders for a cogent, academic-organizer case for queer/trans abolitionist praxis. The work of Dean Spade with SRLP and Joey Mogul with reparations work for survivors of police torture in Chicago are also instructive.

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might mean. Voth writes, “there is no body, no sexuality, and, simply put, no sex outside the

long history of Western imperialism’s shattering of the world” (CF, n296, author’s emphasis).

Even the Stretchers, from their mysterious, out-of-time hideaway6 are not outside this history,

and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming bodies cannot escape it either. The minoritarian

subject position is especially implicated in or marked by this history, because it persists even

“after” (read here the heaviest, scariest quotes available) the Western imperial adventure has

concluded, “after” colorblindness has become the normative politic, “after” gay marriage and

related legislative “victories.” And, indeed, there is a different “after” offered within the novel

as well, a “thieftopia” that Jack and Bess will found with whomever remains of the

revolutionary resistance group within which Bess grew up (CF, 313). As Bess says, in a

deterritorializing gesture to a kind of hell on earth, “there is no utopia of the Damned save the

one we will make ourselves, and we will make it” (CF, 315).

Utopia is, as referenced above, Jose Esteban Muñoz’s rejoinder to the perceived

pessimism of Lee Edelman’s evisceration of the “future of the Child.” Muñoz suggests hope as

a “critical affect” and methodology (CU, 4). He offers a couple of quick takes on this

methodology, from strikingly different sources. From Ernst Bloch, the Marxist theorist of hope

and messianism, Muñoz borrows hope as a hermeneutic to combat political pessimism—an

interesting note in the face of the recent wave of British Marxist pessimism7. From JL Austin,

language philosopher of the mid 20th century, Muñoz adopts felicitous speech acts, which are

those that do something as well as say something (CU, 9, author’s emphasis). Muñoz goes on

6 See more on this in the Time section of this work. 7 See the earliest issues of Salvage magazine, whose subtitle is (as of 7/20) “your hope disgusts us,” for a survey of some of the heaviest-hitters of the disorganized Left out-pessimism-ing one another.

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to assert that the eventual disappointment of either or both of these methodologies is no

reason to abandon hope altogether (CU, 10). This persistence can be read as exemplary of his

queer politics of the incommensurable (CU, 193). It might also be measured against Sara

Ahmed’s politics of disorientation, which hold both that “it is important that we do not idealize

queer worlds or simply locate them in an alternative space” (QP, 106), and that one “must not

make it obligatory or a responsibility for queer identifying people” (QP, 177). The latter, as

noted above, is justified by avoiding any “straightening” of queer politics that might render it

homonormative, and perhaps the former for a not dissimilar reason. Instead, these queer

politics “look back to conditions of arrival” (QP, 178) in a measure designed to refuse to inherit,

as inheriting the past “would be to inherit one’s own disappearance.” The conditions of arrival

are a bit mysterious: is it the moment when queerness is marked from the outside as a

deviation against which to found a norm? Or are they more individual, these conditions, as

understanding arrival may offer a way to avoid inheriting that which is forced upon minoritarian

subjects? In either case, the projects of histories such as Susan Stryker’s and Leslie Feinberg’s

would seem to fly in the face of this impulse; trans heritage is coextensive with each of their

politics, and for Feinberg is nothing less than a direct call to arms. Feinberg considered the

revolutionary task of stripping discriminatory or oppressive values attached to masculinity or

femininity to be part and parcel with the defense of self-determining freedom of gender

expression (Transgender Warriors, 103, author’s emphases). Muñoz says incommensurable,

Ahmed prefers disoriented, Feinberg calls for “the right to physical ambiguity and

contradiction” (ibid), which requires quite a different doctrine of rights than those which

dictate who can marry or enlist in the military.

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A(n) (Identity) Politics of Violence and the Acceptance Thereof

As Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes narrator reminds us, “every femme knows what

happens to tranny girls caught by pigs” (FF, 108), and “whenever blood is shed […] it’s trans girls

who pay, in the end” (FF, 115). Violence and the minoritarian go hand-in-hand as the

enforcement of normativity often requires the violence workers of the state. Gayle Salamon

notes that “violence is offered” by popular media coverage “as an essential feature of trans

identity” (AB, 107), and David Valentine adds “thinking critically about violence” is central “to

understanding the politics of transgender as a category” (IT, 205). This study is wary of

overtheorizing violence, but it does not seem a stretch to suggest that any politics of the

minoritarian must account for the centrality or essentialness of violence: real, presumed, or

both. When Deleuze and Guattari theorize the speed of deterritorialization, they are of course

referencing tropes and devices within a text or aesthetic object. This study would add that

when violence is a looming element of one’s subject position—the phobic public spheres seem

to have relatively few other tools at their disposal for encountering their phobias—many

deterritorializing elements are accelerated. Lifespan itself, along with the heteronormative

mile markers that are assumed within it, displays specific varieties of acceleration, as evinced

by the fiction at hand. If one is much more likely to be murdered, as is markedly and shockingly

the case for Black trans women,8 “longevity” becomes farcical as an indicator of “a life

8 Could cite the most recent statistics, though it is almost redundant to do so. But then again, that would offer the opportunity to comment on how grossly underreported these sorts of demographic crime statistics are when it comes to queer, trans, undocumented, and sex working people, as each has a reason to not disclose those characteristics to the state.

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well/fully lived.” Furthermore, monogamous amative coupling (state-recognized or not),

biological children and rearing, and the availability and desirability of various forms of employ

are each directly impacted by minoritarian status, and each tinged with potential for violence—

physical, emotional, and cognitive. It is little wonder that, early in Confessions of the Fox, Bess

finds that a pastor’s “belief in peacefulness was unforgiveable” as “peacefulness would never

vanquish unstoppable cruelty” (CF, 25). In this context, in which everything takes on a

minoritarian political dimension, if the politics being deterritorialized are those which sanction

and even encourage violence, then the reterritorialization is violent resistance. The state and

the majoritarian have no purchase on resistance; just as racism and misogyny are based on top-

down power dynamics (though both can be internalized and enacted by those who are subject

to them), resistance is definitionally bottom-up. Patricia Hill Collins sees violence as more than

a tool of the majoritarian when considering its comportment to minoritarian subjects. She

theorizes violence as a “saturated site of power relations” (Intersectionality as Critical Theory,

238), a conceptual glue which binds systems of power together. Thinking of gender expression

or categorization as one such system of power illustrates this nicely; the entire problem with

gender transgression has to do with the ways in which it unbinds all of the state’s obsession

with binarism and hierarchicalism. When there are two—man/woman, white/nonwhite,

gay/straight—they are much easier to stack, and also easier to divide within. Valentine

considers violence/violations that may occur or be enacted “when people are drawn into

institutionalized categories which do not necessarily make sense of their selves” (Imagining

Transgender, 223). The novel can be a form particularly adept at examining how individuals are

“drawn into” categories, and how (and if) they might draw themselves or be drawn out.

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Valentine continues: “in the constitution of ‘transgender’ as an identity category, and a

category of political action, the experience of violence becomes available as a theory of the self,

where it is assumed that one’s attempts to claim a non-ascribed gender are met, almost per

force, by violent opposition” (ibid, 227). This is a self-protective assumption, but obviously not

one without consequences, some more apparent than others. The phenomenology of violence

as an element of identity construction is one which requires imagination, including, to use the

terms of abolitionist thought, imagination of a world without that violence and the forces which

perpetuate it. Valentine attempts to invert the force—a deterritorialization—when he

prescribes that to “harness the power of this narrative force,” one must narrate oneself

through institutionalized frameworks. He is, again, speaking more directly to service provision

and institutionalized care, but it is not much of a leap to consider institutionalized spheres

which govern time, identity, and labor, and how one might narrativize themselves within and

through them. Furthermore, long-form narrative, the novel, is itself an institutionalized

framework, and one which can experiment with, recontextualize, and imagine relationships

with as much or as little direct attention to identity-formation as its creator desires. T

Fleischmann, in the midst of their multi-generic Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through,

writes: “Being a person next to someone feels precious, especially while so many forces in the

world work with such violence to make sure I am not next to so many people” (TT, 111). This

conspiracy can be opened onto the novel, and thus consider what forces both within and

outside a text violently enforce distance. The novel-as-nearness argument serves as

justification for its persistence as a vehicle for minor literature as well as the ways in which it is

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(markedly, self-consciously, even intentionally) insufficient in cataloging this distance and

working against the forces which enforce it.

Near the end of her poignant, experimental, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), Hazel

Jane Plante’s protagonist notes that it is important to record that her friend Vivian, to whom

the novel is dedicated, did not die by suicide. And broader than that: “We aren’t defined by

how we happen to die” (182). The “we” here is perhaps inclusive of any person, but the

narrator, in these waning few pages of the work, brings into focus what she does not want the

novel to become. “This is my resistance to most events that only focus on reading the names of

trans folks and how they were killed. They weren’t martyrs who died for a cause. Trans women

of colour are murdered for trying to live their lives. Clearly, there’s a value in saying their

names, in remembering them. But I want to know who they were, how they lived, who and

what they loved in this world.” The violence with which minoritarian trans folks contend is, for

Plante, at odds with being properly and fully remembered. As such, a politics of violence and

violent resistance is all too easily a politics of erasure, dis-membering, and reductive, statistical

definition. Minor literature need not memorialize, but it can exploit unique capacities to make

room for remembering, as does Plante’s novel.

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Chapter 3

Everything Takes on a Collective Value

Collective should be read here as revolutionary potential. Though they do not quite

wheel around to it explicitly, Deleuze and Guattari more than imply that collectivity among

minoritarian subjects is dangerous in its potential to become. In a Homeric turn, they suggest

that the majority is never anybody, always Nobody (as in The Odyssey), whereas the minority

has the potential to become everybody. Stated more forcefully: “All becoming is minoritarian”

(TP, 105). So the charge of minor literature is the function of collective, revolutionary

enunciation, and “if the writer is at the margins or completely outside his or her fragile

community, this situation allows the writer all the more possibility to express another possible

community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (TML,

17). It is an entirely utopian kind of thinking, a collective messianism, which again invokes both

Davis’s and Gilmore’s horizonal view of prisons to abolish just as well as Muñoz’s utopias to

cruise. The literary machine becomes the relay for the revolutionary machine-to-come, and in

its attempt to fulfill collective enunciation, “literature is the people’s concern” (TML, 18,

authors’ emphasis). Within this people’s concern, then, are included some component

characteristics of minor literature, some positive and additive, others negative and subtractive.

As subjecthood is the enantiomorphic device of the oppressor, Deleuze and Guattari

attempt to detail a minor literature without a subject; instead, “there are only collective

assemblages of enunciation” (TML, 18, authors’ emphasis). This idea raises some questions

about what could be meant by “subject”; for now, it can be thought of as the overlap between

a protagonist, subjectified by a Master, and a singular extrapolable topic/theme/idea. Both of

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these are, of course, too abstract in the absence of applicative examples, and so an evaluation

of the tenability of subject-less literature will have to wait just a bit longer before some are

introduced. But perhaps the linguistic turn which initiated this entire affair could offer some

clarity. Minor literature is in large part oppositional, as recognized in the elements of

deterritorialization as well as its politics. Deleuze and Guattari suggest it can oppose its

oppressed quality (presumably the majoritarian language) to language’s oppressive quality to

find points of “nonculture or underdevelopment” (TML, 26). (Literary) language becomes an

interrogative tool, deterritorializing culture and warping the neoliberal metric of development

or progress. While it would be simple enough to lay out the oppositional characteristics of the

Master’s normative subject (white, cis-gender, heterosexual, upwardly mobile, conventionally

healthy, neurotypical et al), the sources of oppression to the collectivity of minoritarian

subjects are almost chimeric in their ubiquity if one attempts to break down the list into atomic

parts. Deleuze and Guattari write, “Since there is no way to draw a firm distinction between

the oppressors and the oppressed or between the different sorts of desire, one has to seize all

of them in an all-too-possible future, hoping all the while that this act will also bring out lines of

escape, parade lines, even if they are modest, even if they are hesitant, even if—and especially

if—they are asignifying” (TML, 59). The coupling of oppressors/oppressed with “different sorts

of desire” makes for an intriguing sorting principle. Does my position within or between

communities and groups ride on what sort of desire I embody? And the statement is so

categorical—there is “no way,” at least as far as a firm distinction goes, and one “has to”—that

we end up with a forceful collectivity. Asignifying, modest, escaping parade lines towards

nonculture are, ultimately, foments of change, and these parade lines will be led by “minor

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qualities of minor characters—part of the project of a literature that wants to be deliberately

minor and draws its revolutionary force from that” (TML, 65). So it is in some way a self-

conscious minoritarization, a becoming-minor that proceeds from qualities and characters,

which is to say: fiction.

Deleuze and Guattari elaborate frustratingly little on the specifics of this conduit

between fiction and collectivity, but they do manage to complete some of the circuitry which

will power the most important part of the engine. To reiterate, and likely not for the last time:

minor literature is a particular machine of expression, concerned with the “production of

intensive qualities directly on the social body, in the social field itself” (TML, 71). The

definitions of these qualities truly require an object, and this study soon turns to one. This

social field, narrowed by minoritarian concerns and expression is the “real state” of a minor

literature in which there exists no “individual concern.” Deleuze and Guattari see as “the

perfect object for the novel” (TML, 81) the assemblage, which consists of two sides. First, as

previously noted, the collective assemblage of enunciation. The enunciation is expression,

deterritorializing form and content, assembled and reterritorialized as literary fiction. The

collectivity can cut either way: as representation in majoritarian literature, or deindividuation in

minoritarian. The other side is the machinic assemblage of desire. This desire can be difficult

to distinguish, but it is also the marker of minoritarian politics, a reaching out, a taking flight, a

becoming-minor.

Minoritarian Non/Collectivity as Revolutionary Potential

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Is minoritarian utopia an inherent contradiction? This question ought to be considered

from (at least) two different perspectives. First, if utopia means no longer being subject to the

violences of phobic public spheres, then utopia in effect means no longer inhabiting

minoritarian subject positions. This could be achieved by deprioritizing distinction (gender or

race become phenotypical in ways less, or at least differently, socially marked), or by blurring it

to unrecognizability (again, spatial metaphors such as spectra or continua may leave room for

finer grains of distinction, but ultimately remain based on potentially/inherently hierarchized

distinction). This is all to say, “minoritarian utopia” would need to obviate the former term to

achieve the latter. The second approach would be constructing utopia from a set of conditions,

many of which are difficult to separate from the language of “freedoms.” For better or for

worse—entirely likely worse—“freedoms” tend to default to a language of “rights,” which then

require protections, enforcements, quotas, and, worst of all, representation. The gravest fear

in championing representation is the smothering of internal distinction and contradiction,

falling prey to Muñoz’s caution that “readings that posit subordinated groups as unified entities

fail to enact a multivalent and intersectional understanding of the various contingencies and

divergencies within a class or group” (D, 115). As referenced above, ascribing class, or even

group, to the minoritarian subjects of trans minor literature is not the task at hand, and

constructing a syllabus of “representative” literature even less so. Minor literature includes a

provision for everything to take on a collective value, neither as a stand-in confederate nor an

ideal type/representative, but as a set of disidentificatory frames which, when read together in

delimited patterns and configurations, offer unique revolutionary potentialities. Whew. What

follows here are a few of these frames, assembled in one order which made sense at the

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moment it was constructed, but which could be unstitched and rebound in numerous ways. As

a reminder: the collectivity here regards subject position. That includes identity, sure, but it

also recognizes that those who are identifying and those who are identified comment

reciprocally on the collective. What revolution here signifies is not reducing phobias or

changing xenophobic opinions via familiarity, it is instead the ways in which minor literature

conveys the unacceptable, impossible, outmoded, and ultimately suffocating public spheres

which are founded upon birthright hierarchy and principled exclusion. It often imagines

something else, if not always something better, and in that way is utopic as well. But the

question of collective/minoritarian utopia can be left open to plumb some different ways for

considering collectivity and revolutionary potential.

Kai Cheng Thom queries collectivity in no uncertain terms at the onset of Fierce

Femmes: “Where are those kinds of stories about trans girls like you and me?” (FF, 1). A fair

question, though the narrator poses it in the introduction to a tale out of time and place,

replete with magical trans goddesses and a sexually possessive ghost—this is a fantastic kind of

story, to be sure. Still, the argument might be that there are few stories of any kind about trans

girls, and thus the critical invocation: you and me. Each of these novels makes a kind of specific

appeal to its readership, and forces one to speculate on two readings thereof: either this is a

novel for trans girls alone, or else anyone reading it is invited/required/subpoenaed/allowed to

consider what kind of trans girls this story is about, and what it means to be one. This is not

necessarily an invocation shared by all fiction, but it is worth wondering what it means for

minor literatures. I am phenomenally unlikely to wake up realizing I am Black, and even if

genealogy or some other revelation reveals my Blackness, I have been read as non-Black my

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entire life, and I would have to consider what it meant to embody a racial subject position with

which I could have no direct experience to date. Perhaps some transition narratives are not

dissimilar to this kind of revelation9, but the varieties of passing and de/reterritorialization for

gender expression, while perhaps sometimes coextensive, are surely not the same. I could list

each of the ways in which I seek to disidentity with whiteness, and I could do the same with

masculinity (though perhaps masc-ness would be more apt), but whereas the former could be

described as antiracism and anti-white supremacy, the latter would bear many descriptions. It

would be lazily reductive and binaristic to label my disidentifications with masc-ness as

feminine or anti-misogynist or even as misandrist, though they might live in each of those

guises. “Trans girls like you and me” makes me consider my own subject position with regards

to the collectivism at hand, and it should and does make me uncomfortable with my

relationship, even if purely accidental or proximal, to both whiteness and masc-ness. Later in

the novel, as the violence and reaction to trans harm picks up, the narrator notes graffiti spray

painted on a wall: “YOU MESS WITH FEMMES YOU MESS WITH US” (FF, 83), which feels very

much in line with trans punk formations such as Philadelphia’s HIRS collective, or other hyper-

protective, sloganeering hardcore bands such as the well-mourned G.L.O.S.S.10. The

disidentification of the spray-painted graffiti should not be overlooked: the “US” is an “*” of

sorts, leaving open those who are messed with to be any who identifies with “messed with”

femmes. As the HIRS song goes, “we love all trans femmes and we support you forever and

ever”—the “we” is equal parts invitation and warning, solidarity and multiplicity. Thom’s

9 Roz Kaveney notes a fear of “transition cliche” in Tiny Pieces of Skull. 10 Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit, for the uninitiated.

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narrator notes that in the violent resistance to violence—a deterritorialization of bodily harm in

the form of offensive self-defense—“nothing has prepared us to feel this connected to one

another, to feel this strong” (FF, 90). The experience of community is not strictly the empathy

of shared bodily harm, it is the mutually-reinforcing conviction of the need to “bash back.”11

Still, while the narrator is enlivened by how the fighting has brought the femmes closer

together, she worries that “they’ll find out what I’m really like” (FF, 91-92), though what that

means exactly is left unspecified. Violence is deterritorialized as identity is reterritorialized, the

latter under the assumption that there is some bedrock, natural identity that can be uncovered

and thus must be actively concealed. In the narrator’s case, this may have more to do with

desire than anything else; she does not quest for an orgasm, but its fulfillment is a

transformative—and collective—moment. Upon achieving this release with trans man Josh,

and a release it is, the narrator proclaims “all our ghosts are free” (FF, 172). The pronominal

collective can refer only to the community of reader and author/narrator. Content here is

sexual fulfillment, expression is a ghost releasing a femme, or, attending to the letter of the

expression, a femme freeing a ghost.

Jack and Bess, participants in the great person-to-person amative romance of the trans

novels here, are bound to a class of criminalized laborers (thieves and sex workers) by the

impending violence of the state. As he transcribes and comments upon the narrative, Voth

realizes that the collectivity at hand is not only revolutionary, but trans-generational,

continuously up/post/back-dated by the Stretchers to animate latent radicality in the tale. Sara

Ahmed (2006) seeks after a version of revolution as not merely economic/political

11 As in Bash Back!, a radical queer liberation formation begun in Chicago in 2007.

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transformation, “but a transformation that happens at the level of subjectivity” (16). The

subjectivity of Confessions of the Fox is multiply framed, containing an array of perspectival

shifts, each offering an account of the subjectivity of revolutionary potential. In addition, Bess

is unable (and perhaps equally unwilling) to conceal her racial minoritarian subject position as

“Lascar” throughout her interactions in London. This non-concealment instigates the kind of

racial and queer “coanimation” (CU, 93) around which Muñoz finds community developing.

Bess’s sense of communitarianism emerges from her being born into the “Fen-Tigers,” a “band

of Freedom fighters” (CF, 183), forced to defend their land from colonizing invaders. She

watches her mother and father both take up arms, and her community battle together without

internal dissent or desertion; race and class were tied to the sense of home and territory in the

Fen, to which she in the ends hopes to return with Jack in order to found their abovementioned

thieftopia. But with Jack, in their little community of deviants from heteronormativity and

proud underclass folk—including the queer Bluebeard and fellow sex worker, Jenny Diver12—

Bess’s design in destroying the venture capitalist and thief-catcher Wild is equal parts anti-

imperialist and deeply personal. Jack, whose transness is at once completely obvious to him

and at the same time understood almost strictly through his desire for Bess, does not

immediately share these revolutionary impulses. His release from indentured servitude

promotes his desire to liberate the objects of capitalist fixation from bondage, but there is no

broader ethos at work. As Bess spins out her plan to ruin Wild—entrepreneur, cop, and

pseudoscientist rolled into one—Jack is dumbfounded: “His entire enterprise? Us?” (CF, 223).

12 The historical Jenny Diver is a deviant of another variety, a wildly bold pickpocket who ended up defiantly hanging for her crimes after returning from exile.

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But Bess is not out to contradict the difficulty or even unlikelihood of success: “It matters that

we try,” and later she appends this imperative, “it matters that we try together,” and a third

time, noting the stakes, “It we don’t fight together—then we’re nothing” (CF, 224). This is

unacceptable to Jack, it does not compute, and Bess knows it: without her, he is nothing, the

void within him takes hold as he imagines himself sinking to the bottom of the filthy Thames.

Halberstam’s queer failure is of the same praxis as Bess’s imperative: failure as a “weapon of

the weak” under capitalism (QF, 88). But the weak cannot act alone if this failure is—

paradoxically though it may seem—to succeed. Again, this success would be based on a

revaluation of values, acknowledging the victories of white supremacy and capitalism while

changing the metric of their evaluation. Halberstam’s failure is (cautiously) optimistic: “all our

failures combined might just be enough, if we practice them well, to bring down the winner”

(QF, 120). The pairing of Jack and Bess is particularly apt for minor literature due to their

different positions in challenging the majority. Lee Edelman suggests that queer folks are “all

so stigmatized for failing to comply with heteronormative mandates” (NF, 17), something trans,

intersex, and sex working people all do in a massive constellation of ways. He writes of “those

queered by the social order,” which is a formulation valuable in ways that his initial screed

might not have predicted: there are valences of gay and lesbian people who are no longer

queered by the social order, who in fact benefit from white supremacy and capitalism

(pinkwashed or not), and whose class position is dependent in part on the same distancing and

subjugation committed, overtly or unconsciously, by their heterosexual compatriots.

Homonormativity will resurface at various intervals later in this study, but suffice it to say for

now that there has been a reterritorialization of various oppressions which are hardly immune

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to being wielded by queer people. But Edelman’s conditions of being queered by the social

order have room for ostensibly “straight” sex workers and ostensibly “het” trans folks as well.

First, per Edelman’s formulation, these queered people can recognize the structuring fantasy

that defines them. Whether they do or not is immaterial; it is a recognizable nexus of fantasy,

and minor literature can deterritorialize it and charge it with collective revolutionary energy.

Second, they can recognize the irreducibility of that fantasy. Even Muñoz’s sense of the

primacy of the ephemeral in queering evidence and memory requires some irreducible fantasy

against which the ephemeral can be read. The extent to which Edelman finds solidarity in the

futurelessness of these queered subjects is open to question, but Muñoz makes plain that his

communitarianism is against antirelationality, which he dresses down as: “romances of the

negative, wishful thinking, and investments in deferring various dreams of difference” (CU, 11).

There is a tension here, though, and one which the literature addresses: it is one thing to

accuse antirelational thinking of deferring dreams, but utopian thinking is, by its very nature,

horizonal, concerned with moving beyond the ugliness of the present world and then what

comes beyond that. Again, it is a perilous and self-defeating form of police or prison

abolitionism that fails to posit what better means of harm reduction replace the violent harm-

creation mechanisms of the state. When Muñoz goes on to suggest that “certain queer

communal logic overwhelms practices of individual identity” (CU, 66), he is proposing a radical

relationality that minor literature is uniquely positioned to depict, if not automatically

accomplish. Bess is cut to the core by her love’s failure to recognize the centrality of the radical

subterfuge to their relation: “the narrowness of Jack’s perspective was alarming” (CF, 234). It is

the revolutionary mutineer Okoh whose words set the full political pitch of the novel in the end,

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and the play on words is irresistible to the reader even as the very active commentator, Voth,

leaves them to breathe on their own: “There are in the world no such men as self-made men!”

(CF, 256, author’s emphasis), and Jack Sheppard is a self-made man in every sense of the word.

He is self-made in his gender transgression (though he needs Bess to consummate his

confidence and sense of self), he is self-made as a thief (though the assistance and

encouragement of his cohort shows him that he is not alone in that making), and he is self-

made in the risks he is willing to take to destroy the worst that capitalism brings to his city in

the form of Wild and Wild’s protection under the law (though this becomes an element of his

character and his community with Bess, Bluebeard, and Jenny). Okoh continues: “Individuals

are, to the mass, like Waves to the ocean […] Freebooters and Mutineers all!”. Of course, the

minoritarian subject is not, strictly speaking, a self-made man. They are defined and read from

without as from within, but communitarianism and collective value is the “within” towards

which minor literature builds. Not everyone is a freebooter and a mutineer; minoritarian

subjects are. The Master is the defamed captain who must be overthrown, and the phobic

public is perhaps the ocean itself. When Voth finally finds a translation of the phrase Bess

repeats in her dreams and with which Okoh concludes his speech, it is rendered in English as

“There are no more Masters” (CF, 258). It is one of the revelations upon joining the Stretchers

that Voth realizes Okoh’s speech has largely been lifted from Frederick Douglas (CF, n260). This

pathway, from a Black slavery abolitionist who gained a massive stage through his words, to a

mutineer revolutionary on a literal stage before a supportive rabble, via a radical revisionist

group who have included luminaries across ages, and reported on by a trans professor who

realizes the pathway all at once, is a panoply of those queered by the social order. Voth notes

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that he is “editing this for us,” those without a sense of home, those who’ve been “dropped

into the world” (CF, n166), again implicating the reader in the project, working from the

optimistic assumption that anyone who would desire to be included in the “us” belongs in it.

Elizabeth Freeman writes about “queer” as a class relation, one which is defined by

“embodied synchronic and diachronic organization” (TB, 19). Queers are a subjugated class,

and one which can be read as reflecting Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus,” which organizes a

form of belonging which “subtends and supersedes” kinship and class (TB, 13). In Freeman’s

version of communitarianism, there is something distinctly physical, which she notes is “a

commitment to bodily potentiality that neither capitalism nor heterosexuality can fully contain”

(TB, 15). This habitus extends through history and in fact registers the shifting meaning of

queer, or trans, for that matter. Freeman accounts for this registry through the concept of

accent, an element of habitus extending beyond the rhythm of words to “encompass kinetic

tempos and the prosodics of interactions between people” (TB, 29). What better vehicle to

examine the prosodics of interactions between people than the novel? It is a durative medium,

one which operates within and against the timespans of reading, recognition, and memory.

Voth asks us to recognize ourselves as being “dropped in the world,” with an origin story that

implies total indifference from the dropper, and subsequently being without a home,

deterritorialized from without. Maria Griffiths speculates to Piranha, the sagacious and

unflappable comrade from whom she steals her cache of heroin, that “it’s pretty much you and

me against the entire world” (N, 93). But the entire world doesn’t give a damn about Maria or

Piranha, their struggles and their class position, their experience as trans femmes and their

increased likelihood of facing violent resistance to their self-determination. And Piranha

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doesn’t take up this gambit, which is emblematic of Maria’s unique ethos of put-upon-ness,

altering the terms of the resistance: “it’s you and me against the rest of the queer community.”

For Piranha, the irony is thick, as they have just accused Maria of being utterly absent as a

compatriot unless in dire need, a fairly cutting comment for anyone, but especially so in

Piranha’s notably isolated state.

Torrey Peters positions each of the three main characters of Infect Your Friends and

Loved Ones in slightly different relations to collective value. The grand conceit of the novella,

that everyone is trans due to being infected with a virus essentially forcing them to choose

hormones to define their gender, if they choose to do so at all, is a startling parallel universe to

the devastation of COVID-19 in 2020-2021. Raleen, the designer of the virus, had a simple, if

not wholly innocent, goal in mind: “I was thinking I wanted to live in a world where everyone

has to choose their gender” (IYFLO, 30). It is a circular and beautiful counterfactual, a snake

eating its own tail: of course this world is already one in which where everyone has to choose

their gender now. The extent to which that choice is respected or seems like a choice at all is

wildly variant, but there are perhaps an increasing number of people that seek to ask questions

regarding what conditions that variability. Raleen’s desire ends up being read as tragic, and

perhaps Peters wants the reader to see that tragedy as inevitable, but if it is, it is only because

the majoritarian population is faced with a forced choice they have not been conditioned to

encounter. Those who are so conditioned, the trans folks who could laugh through tears at the

apocalyptic effects of the virus, have a couple of other ways of reading it, as embodied by

Peters’ narrator and her ex, Lexi. In one of the central exchanges between them, at their post-

apocalyptic reunion, the narrator realizes the meaning of the slogan—“Tee Furty”—of the trans

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femme enclave (utopia?) at which she reencounters her former partner. The narrator

proclaims to Lexi, almost apologetically, though it comes as little surprise to either, “I was never

t4t” (IYFLO, 64), a slogan of trans-for-trans solidarity. Lexi, hardened even in her most

vulnerable moments, responds, heartbreakingly: “I wanted you to be t4me.” The narrator

assents that that’s what she meant: “I was never t4Lexi,” which is more accurate, as Peters’

narrator is embarrassed of Lexi for a variety of reasons which the former ascribes to class and

feminine beauty standards. She is as t4t as anyone else around her, at least until the event of

the virus. Kai Cheng Thom’s narrator is also faced with a (non)t4t moment when some in her

community doubt that she should date Josh, a trans man, due to his masc-ness: his being trans

“doesn’t change anything” (FF, 166) for them, reminding the reader of the border wars that can

exist within and between minoritarian subject positions. It’s not at all clear that Josh’s being

trans changes anything for him, either, though his class position ends up undoing his

relationship with the narrator as well.

With the fierce femmes, though, the collective value is ferocious and bound by

protective love, in the maternal figure of Kimya, and violent resistance, in that of Valeria. Talk

of demonstrating after the murder of one of their compatriots turns to debating the inevitable

violence that will follow a trans femme display of resistance (FF, 66). But Valeria is quick to

acknowledge that community persistence will result in a battle, almost redundantly noting:

“trans girls fight every single day of our lives” (FF, 71). In one way or many others, each of the

novels (and much of the theory) reaches this observation. It will cost Valeria her own individual

relationship with Kimya, not least for endangering the callow narrator, but Valeria holds fast:

“Times are changing. We are changing” (FF, 73, author’s emphasis). Queer communal logic is

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here one of resistance which sacrifices the personal and intimate altogether. “Changing”

means deterritorializing violence from an act of state control to one of free expression. When

Riki Ann Wilchins suggests that community is built through “tactics, not identities” (Read My

Lips, 194), she gestures towards the fundamental asymmetry of violence as a weapon of the

state as compared to a tactic towards revolution. This does not simply mean guns and fists, it

means the nonviolent aggression of Camp Trans and the promise that queers will in fact bash

back. When M. Jacqui Alexander seeks after “an opening on how to build strategic solidarities

among marginalized communities by refusing to mimic practices of the state” (PC, 249), she

obviously is not referring to putting kids in cages or sending them to deprogramming camps—

these are tactics available only to the majority through state apparatus, anyway. She is instead

referring to a minoritarian-destroying practice of heterosexualization, which she codes as the

“process through which globalization is aligned.” Alignment is an interesting choice of verbiage,

it sounds much like Ahmed’s “orientation” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “reterritorialization.”

But alignments can be coanimated fictions of the phobic publics and the minority, a la

David Valentine’s titular concept, that of a “transgender imaginary.” Valentine suggests that

trans identity and community are each products of an imaginary (Imagining Transgender, 74,

author’s emphasis). For him, the minoritarian knowledge project of transgender is “a way of

actively creating a community” (ibid, 98, author’s emphasis), by which he means identity, group

experience, and practice. His is a deterritorialization of community, both literal and figurative,

in that he suggests that lacking “formalized contexts of community” often constitutes

identification with categories (ibid, 118), which should immediately raise a couple of questions.

First, is this a bad thing? Are categories here seen as smothering the mutability of gender

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expression and identification, and are the de facto tools of the Master to clarify the phobias of

his public? Second, who exactly is doing the identifying, and what are these formalized

contexts? As to the latter, the immediate image may be one of heteronormative, state-

supported or at least state-endorsed contexts—family, home, neighborhood, class, race,

school, and, depending on how one reads it, gender or just normative gender expression. For

the former, Valentine is almost certainly suggesting that trans people (especially the often

outdoor, migrant, sex working trans women of color with whom he interacts) lack these

contexts and so identify according to available categories. But it might just as soon be that the

identification is done primarily from without, a top-down imposition of categories from the

same forces that disallow formalized contexts of community, or refuse to recognize and actively

attempt to defame and destroy those that are not endorsed as sufficiently formal/ized. This

prompts Valentine to ask another question regarding the imaginary at hand: “What does

transgender achieve in organizing knowledge about people?” (ibid, 145). One first-blush

reaction to this question is: who cares? Perhaps it is the conditioning of the contemporary

political moment to take such a query as an “all genders matter” kind of fascist-obscurantism-

masquerading-as-pluralism, but Valentine seems truly to seek to interrogate whether this

particular imaginary constitutes a (set of) categor(y/ies) or (de)formalized context(s) for

community. Riki Ann Wilchins bemoans the loss of revolutionary potential in the move from

“All People Are Queer” to “Gay Is As Good As Straight” (Read My Lips, 194, author’s emphases).

One might ask: does All People Are Queer or All People Are Trans, for that matter, “organize

knowledge” in a manner useful or operable for subjects who labor in those communities/under

those categories today? But the two types of organization are incompatible; Wilchins was

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writing from the frontlines of a border war which sought to render her gender expression

illegible on two fronts, heteronormative straights and womyn-only lesbians. Valentine is

looking in some ways to complicate, not disentangle: “insistence in mainstream

accommodationist gay and lesbian activism that homosexuality is not inflected by gender

variance is at root an attempt to argue for the validity of male homosexuals as men and to

erase the stigma that attaches to femininity in male-bodied people” (Imagining Transgender,

236, author’s emphases). Valentine sees this impulse as one that ultimately denies gender

identity, and depends on gender as social difference, rather than steeped in and borne of

power relations. Alexander offers a further caution against a sense of community motivated

strictly by desire: “sexual consumption confuses personhood with bodies only, but bodies only

do not construct critical communities of affinity” (Pedagogies of Crossing, 88). But resistance to

majoritarian oppression, while arguably “bodily” in a number of ways, can construct or

constitute these communities of affinity. Minor literature is able to group works according to

this sort of affinity, one which resembles Muñoz’s experience of being-in-common-in-difference

enacting a “necessary communism” (CU, 203). This communing of incommensurable

singularities is “antithetical to our inner and outer colonialism” (CU, 204). What is

incommensurable, exactly, could be a number of things: tactics and strategies, rationales and

reasons, expression and content, but the communing shares the common goals of resistant

self-determination and working in opposition to the Master’s tools in maintaining phobic public

spheres.

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While incommensurability is a high value for Muñoz, not least because it confounds the

Master’s deductive logic13, Jack Halberstam points to transgender (or, later, trans*) as (always

potentially) participating in oppositional cultures or geographies of resistance which “are not

symmetrical to the authority they oppose” (QTP, 13). The speeds of deterritorialization and

reterritorialization are under no burden of reciprocity or proportionality. Flexibility, for trans

resistance, is both commodity and form of commodification (QTP, 18), a resistance to binaries

not just regarding gender expression, but also those between unilateral oppression and

uniqueness, as well as between flexibility and rigidity. The imaginary here thrives on

asymmetricity, and perhaps even aporia—the flexibility to be inflexible and the recognition that

uniqueness alone is not resistant by default. The former is a negotiation undertaken by an

individual or a community, but not between majority and minoritarian subject; the latter is

itself a resistance to neoliberal dictates regarding individualism and pinkwashed

representation-as-equity. Halberstam cites transgender as “a term of relationality,” describing

not identity but “relation between people, within a community, or within intimate bonds” (QTP,

49). Even at this intermediate stage in the consideration of how minor literature allows us to

consider relations within, between, against, and above or below, one still may be prompted to

ask: what are the stakes of relationality v identity in the descriptive opposition Halberstam sets

up here? A pure opposition would mean that identity is by definition non-relational, and

relationality does not define, satisfy, or inure identity. This is a peculiar sort of identity,

something sui generis which defies or supersedes external amendment. The relationality side is

13 One version of this deduction would be entirely binaristic: “If you’re not this, then you must be that. And if you want to be neither, then you don’t exist.”

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perhaps less peculiar: I could consider all the ways in which I relate to others which seem not to

bear on my identity. Still, is my cisness or transness, queerness or straightness

simply…situational? The answer may be far simpler; there may be a time at the horizon which

recognizes transition as a perpetual truth, similar to learning or advancing towards death in that

it need not be remarked upon. As such, transgender is in fact an identity only in relation to that

horizon not being reached, utopic or not.

Minor literature is, at its root, descriptive of two sets of relationships, one dialectical,

both hermeneutic. The first is the relationship between minoritarian literary production and

(the) great and established majoritarian literary Tradition(s). In the spheres of aesthetic

production, political ideology, and community organization, the minoritarian exists only in

relation (which is not automatically to say contradistinction) to the majoritarian spheres.

Where they intersect, subsume, or meet only at nodular points is where de/reterritorializations

become legible. The second set is relationships between minoritarian subjects, perhaps within

community structures, which are those that produce or pay down revolutionary potential.

These horizontal relationships are not, as noted above, symmetrical to those of majoritarian

counterparts, but one could argue that they do not have majoritarian counterparts, because

the state largely fulfills the survival functions for which minoritarian relationships are forced to

substitute. Kai Cheng Thom’s narrator recounts tales of being “fierce femmes on a mission of

vengeance” and, as crucially as the vengeance itself, “girl, it is so fun” (FF, 83, author’s

emphasis). The femme again invites the reader in as co-conspirator, gendering them, and

enthusiastically noting a characteristic of the vengeance which is nearly redundant given the

buoyancy of much of the description of the fighting. Thom’s narrator is undergoing a sort of

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rebirth within an entirely different community structure, one which could be called “family,”

but resembles in only the most tenuous ways the “nuclear” family structure in which they’ve

spent the bulk of the first couple of decades of life. This new life reveals personal

characteristics which could not have been reflected as clearly without contemporaneous

destructive danger, essentially a campaign of state extinction. It dawns on the narrator, “you’re

not the kind of girl who saves people. You’re the kind who kills them” (FF, 114, author’s

emphasis), but not all people, of course, and not the ones who need saving, certainly. The

revolutionary potential of these minoritarian community structures is based equally on

fungibility and division of labor, in the very broadest sense of the latter idea. But collective

value is also based on collective knowledge, intuition, and experience, and part of the attraction

of the femmes is that the narrator can learn without fear of error or reprisal, so long as her

commitment to her community is not in question. There is room for positive failure and

shifting definitions thereof.

Two of the femmes, former lovers Lucretia and Valeria, argue about praxis, including the

consequences of the violence and whether it is scaring off sex work clients and thus harming

sex working femmes. This issue is not uncomplicated, echoing a very real debate around the

role of the client in sex worker rights and protections14, beyond simply representing an income

source. The personal, political, and communitarian crash against each other in ways not

accessible to the Grand Literary Traditions, in no small part because everything does not take

on collective value—they are the individual works of genius, representative of a time and place,

14 See Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Worker Rights: “The worker’s interests are not identical to those of the client” (33).

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sure, but also the Great Works of Great Men (irrespective of gender, perhaps; the default term

is men, even if incognito as Bell or Sand, Elliot or Dinesen). Valeria levies the devastating

charge of Lucretia lacking a revolutionary imagination: “you didn’t believe a new world is

possible” (FF, 100), and the latter rejoins by deterritorializing this imagination from the political

to the personal, from content to expression, “you loved your imaginary revolution more than

you loved me.” This parrying could be written off as a simple difference of priorities, or even

principles, and perhaps it is in part both. But there is a cross purpose here as well, an

incommensurability between accusation and rejoinder: surely there is a simplified version of a

revolutionary praxis that allows for both fierce love of those closest to us and imagination of

the new world? One could, and many have, not least Che Guevara, proclaimed that one cannot

exist in the absence of the other15. But class consciousness and revolutionary sentiments do

not automatically suggest minoritarian collective value. Rapunzelle and Kimya stage a different

version of this debate as they discuss the narrator’s position in the femme community.

Rapunzelle’s communitarianism is based on resistance: “that kid is a fighter, just like every

other girl we know” (FF, 149, author’s emphases). Kimya, as with many of the arguments in the

novel, does not deny these claims, instead emphasizing that the narrator deserves “to have a

normal childhood.” But “normal” here cannot mean normative; the kind of normal that

demands liberating oneself from their suburban life, joining up with a big, dangerous city group

of trans femmes, and essentially abetting a revolution-in-miniature is not one to which many

15 “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” (from “From Algiers, for Marcha. The Cuban Revolution Today,” originally published March 1965 (in The Che Reader, Ocean Press, 2005).

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“children” have access. The third way, that being a fighter is a normal manner of comporting

oneself, even or especially as a child, is left in the ether. Childhood is a realm ripe for

deterritorialization, as this study will explore later in considering time and history in minor

literature.

T Fleishmann speculates on both more and less organized queer communities. They

suggest that the leather community—as represented by Chicago’s Leather Archive—“is not

about inclusion, I don’t think, or representation,” as “inclusion is sometimes just more people

performing labor to hold up the bullshit” (TT, 137). Any pessimism of Fleishman’s is based on

the violence of the state (generally a violence resulting in division and retributive harm in

response to violating its dictates) or bad faith/consciousness resulting from white supremacy

and transphobia. The “inclusion” cited here is neoliberal diversity ethos, which tends, as it

appears to expand the sphere of diversity, to push those outside it further and further from

access, safety, and self-determination. Fleishmann sees this ethos as inapplicable in the leather

community, which, by extension, means they want it not to apply to queer or trans

communities. Their own writing, as a creative/aesthetic act, is horizonal even when it is

particularly personal. They write that better than “being scared” is “to summon the full power

of my imagination, which proves the world malleable, and that the better world is possible”

(ibid). Minor literature leaves room both for the suggestion that “the better world” exists

simply by comparison to the miseries of this one, and to speculate on all the ways in which it

could come to be. None of the literature at hand is particularly futuristic; in fact, each of the

novels has a distinct purchase on the time period it depicts. But neither are they Realist per se,

as each is equally predicated on speculation and promise that mandates the irruption of the

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irreal. Both the collective value and the revolutionary potential of this minor literature rest on

this restive sense of speculation.

Jack Halberstam depicts this speculation as, at least in the intermediate, destructive:

“the pursuit of trans* worlds means shattering the realities within which those trans* bodies

require recognition, rights, and accommodations” (T*, 82). It is very much a disability studies

perspective, that “disabled” or “abnormal” is a purely negative definition, legible only in light of

rules, laws, and regulations which normatively defined “abled” or “normal.” Halberstam is not

necessarily promoting the “everyone is trans” concept here, suggesting instead concepts of

impossibility and trans* “unrealities,” i.e. unrealized/unrealizable worlds/ways of living/modes

of being. Perhaps the most difficult suturing of the above, in a revolutionary praxis, at least, is

that between unrealized and unrealizable. The former is the future world, the horizon, while

the latter is what lies beyond it. But the shattering is, in no small part, inhered in simple

persistence—an individual or community must persist before it can resist and revolt.

Fleishmann writes that since “the police state wants me dead, […] every time I fuck and I’m

happy and I do what I want I should like to call that anti-state action. The people I love alive—

yes, we weaken the state” (TT, 138). Minor literature should be able to express the

revolutionary potential of persistence, of fucking and being happy and staying alive as

weakening the state. Halberstam reframes persistence slightly: “as ‘transgender’ comes to

represent the acceptable edge of gender variance, trans* signifies the cost of that level of

acceptance” (T*, 50). Is acceptance the natural/desired/expected result of persistence? The

cost is the cost of inclusion cited above, the shifting margins which compact and compress the

identities and experiences within them. Halberstam suggests, in response to the “insufficiency

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of current classificatory systems,” holding open the histories of variant bodies. Whereas

memoir and firsthand accounts have been critical in so doing thus far, this study proposes that

a minor literature, an expanding body of fiction which experiments with and presses at the

“acceptable edges,” is the shifting and malleable force which will hold open those histories in

revolutionary collectivist ways.

Halberstam asks: “when the male-female binary crumbles, what new constellations of

alliance and opposition emerge?” (T*, 108), to which one might answer, surely some, but

hopefully both are determined by class consciousness and a horizon of the collapse of

neoliberal capitalist hegemony. Juliana Huxtable appeals for the moment when “those of us

who have never been served by the failing/falling orders take primacy” (MPG, 18), calling out

the testimonial smothering of the minoritarian subject. Taking primacy might acknowledge

Leslie Feinberg’s question, which could be read as exasperated: “Isn’t it time for the struggle

against capitalism to come out of the closet?” (Transgender Warriors, 127). This call to action

comes in the midst of a very personal sort of archaeology which attempts to both reclaim and

reimagine a transgender history that runs in line with human history, and to speculate on what

it would mean for that interweaving to be taken as patent fact. One thing it would reveal is the

ways in which state (and “culture,” as filtered through the state) command of gender

expression and reception is inextricably entwined with other supportive hegemonies and

erasures. An out-of-the-closet struggle means queering/transing the revolution, seeking after

the strange communitarianism of incommensurability, and, critically, an examination of and

demand for legibility: “how can we have a discussion of how much sex and gender diversity

actually exists in society, when all the mechanisms of legal and extralegal repression render our

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lives invisible?” (ibid, 102). The persistent question, inching closer to the core considerations

regarding minor literature in this study, is how can/does fiction render these lives less invisible

or more legible? This means, broadly: what can/does minor literature do/demand?

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Part II

Chapter 4

Trans Time

Early in Casey Plett’s Little Fish, Sophie philosophizes on the various ways in which “age

is completely different for trans people” (LF, 11), and each of the trans femme chosen family

weighs in. Wendy suggests that trans folks experience a “second age,” which proceeds from

when they begin taking hormones. This could be read as a kind of rebirth, if one seeks a

particularly momentous reading, or simply a marking of time since a new, routine occurrence

becomes part of one’s life. Lila offers a radically different take, that trans folks do not “age as

much,” because they tend to die sooner. In this take, age is played against an end, rather than

a beginning; it is age as “time that remains.” There are various echoes of this observation in

trans literature, such as Kai Cheng Thom’s narrator’s observation in Fierce Femmes and

Notorious Liars regarding a legendary elder who is “the only trans woman I have ever heard of

who is over seventy years old” (FF, 39). Indeed, there are no others in the works at hand1,

ending “generational” knowledge and lineage at a single generation—there are no

grandparents. But Sophie has a different set of answers to her own query, which somewhat

nestle chronologically between those of Wendy and Lila. She first reminds the other women

that hormones both restore and preserve youth. This age is, to varying degrees, decoupled

1 Although the almost wholly absent Mexica in Tiny Pieces of Skull certainly appears to be nearly that when she finally arrives in person.

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from appearance or outward (and, inevitably, gendered) markers of how old someone is, or

should act. Secondly, Sophie notes that benchmarks of cis life don’t apply to most trans people,

a variation on one component of Jack Halberstam’s “queer time.”

Queer time can be a powerful, if not automatically empowering, refiguration of

temporality, and Halberstam offers a kind of pivot between time and narrative past/future.

Elizabeth Freeman suggests “chrononormativity” as a late-stage capitalist use of time to

organize maximally productive human bodies (TB, 3). She writes, “naked flesh is bound into

socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation.”2 This “socially meaningful”

could easily be recast as “socially or culturally legible,” wherein only the maximally productive

bodies are visible to the phobic public spheres. The houseless, the cognitively, affectively, or

physically differentially abled, sex working people and other criminalized laborers, the

undocumented…the list of bodies which cannot easily be so bound is long and perhaps grows

longer as the late-stage grows later. But the political impact goes beyond legibility and

meaning-making. These bodies resist the grand narrative of neoliberal progress, as “in a

chronobiological society, the state and other institutions including representational

apparatuses, link properly temporalized bodies to narratives of movement and change” (TB, 4).

And of course, those bodies that fail to link up with these narratives must be discarded or

written out of existence. The novel itself is one such representational apparatus3, and minor

2 Susan Bordo puts it a slightly different way, as regards the regulation of women’s bodies through routine. She labels the body as text of culture and a “practical, direct locus of social control” (165). Through “exacting disciplines” of diet/makeup/dress which order time and space for many women, “we are rendered less socially oriented and more centripetally focused on self-modification” (166). 3 Though Timothy Bewes notes a kind of cross-purpose in analyzing it as such. On one hand he asks, “What more ‘temporal’ form of literature exists than the contemporary novel?” (“Introduction: Temporalizing the Present” in Novel, 159), and yet “the conceptual structures that organized the interpretation of art and literature during the

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literature can operate a “queer politics of time” (TB, 28) that blocks the transformation into

grand historical narrative.4 Revolutionary potential can both mean fulfilling a cyclical telos (the

concept of perpetual revolution), or it can mean a recoding of history according to a different

set of narratives. The metanarratives of the long 19th century—colonialism/empire, historical

materialism/Marxism, psychoanalysis—were pretty damned grand themselves, and each has

been considered at great length and depth as regards the great literary form of that same

epoch. In trans minor literature, the menu of temporal counternarratives is deeply tied to

embodiment and the ways in which the Master seeks to limit, curtail, and deny that

embodiment. In Sophie’s formulations above, as well as some others detailed moving forward,

one can witness examples of Freeman’s “stubborn lingering of pastness” as “hallmark of queer

affect” (TB, 4). This lingering threatens to become an anchor, a binding to a past which is no

longer one’s own, unless there is another time not just outside public spheres, but separate

from them, not only exterior, but ulterior, anterior, perhaps even (proudly) inferior.

Jack Halberstam suggests that queer time is not solely “compression and annihilation,”

but also potentiality of life “unscripted by heteronormativity” (QTP, 2). This potentiality will be

achieved, as it happens, by transcending or simply discarding all the tropes of novels past: this

queer time is “specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one

leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and

inheritance” (QTP, 6). Still, if queer time resists narratives of linear (or even exponential)

20th century […] all participate in […] temporalizing (or rather, de-temporalizing) ideology. Each proposes a differentiation between subject and object and between the world and the work. Each, that is to say, remains caught in the problematic of representation” (ibid, 160). 4 Does this resistance challenge Lukacs’s presumption of society as the principle subject of the novel? Do minor literary works express their revolutionary potential in part through counter-social subjects and expression? Does the mantle of society belong to the Master?

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progress and growth, it does seem there is a kind of compression, at least if read from the

Master’s perspective. What is claustrophobic and limiting to one subject can be a potboiler of

explosive potential for another. M. Jacqui Alexander describes a palimpsestic time which brings

the “here” and “there” into ideological proximity within social formation and among/between

social formations positioned as opposites in “the linear narration of time” (Pedagogies of

Crossing, 246). There is a distinct deterritorialization and reterritorialization circuitry at work

here: the minoritarian subject is illegible to the majority because they defy the linear narration

of time, and as they queer time through their very persistence, they in turn render the master

narrative equally unreadable. The collapsing of “proximities” may initially read as mixing

metaphors when one is describing time, but linearity itself is a proximal idea, based on distance

and nearness. The fact that it is also unidirectional simply makes irruptions that much more

registerable. Halberstam also suggests that queer adjustments of time require and/or produce

new conceptions of space (QTP, 4). In Confessions of the Fox, Dr. Voth finds himself at the

intersection of exteriorized space and time as he absconds with his manuscript to continue

sharing and annotating the tale of Jack Sheppard. In one of the seemingly more fantastical

twists in the novel, Voth writes that he is “very far away, and I do not mean this primarily in

terms of space. I am living at a different timescale. Not parallel to yours, but apart from it” (CF,

n266). This spatial distinction is crucial: parallelism implies linearity, unbending and infinite, as

two lines described as such never intersect. “Apart,” however, is wholly delimited, and

implies…well, nothing specific, at least as regards any spatial metaphor for the experience of

time. As Voth joins the archivist Stretchers, he notes that they see themselves living in the year

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“WE ESCAPED!” which has “lasted them a long time” and, in total, “they do not know how long

it will last” (CF, n279). But is it, then, infinite?

Likely not. Jose Esteban Muñoz offers one reconceiving that might hold: straight time is

self-naturalizing5 in its linearity, while queer time is ecstatic in its horizontality (CU, 25).

Whereas Alexander suggests that the “here” and “there” move into ideological proximity,

Muñoz suggests queer time vacates the here and now for the then and there. This seeming

devaluation of the present is, in the minoritarian view, more about a revaluation of ‘what

makes the here and now so great, anyway?’ Muñoz (drawing on the work of Tavia Nyong’o)

introduces the concept of waiting as something Black, queer, Latino, or trans (CU, 175), in that

those who wait are “out of time.” Being out of time in this way naturally devalues the present,

the waiter is cast out of straight time’s rhythm, and these waiters subsequently make worlds in

new temporal or spatial configurations. Halberstam is more explicit about these configurations,

as he sees queer time and space emergent at least in part “in opposition to the institutions of

family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (QTP, 1), to which “cis-ness” could certainly be

appended. The novel, in both its potential bagginess and inevitable boundedness, is a suitable

vessel for working through queerness as “outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life

schedules, and eccentric economic practices”6 which can serve to “detach queerness from

sexual identity” (QTP, 1). Minor literature is not simply demographic, any more than transness

5 Naturalization/naturalizing/natural are enormously stressed tropes in this work. Perhaps this needs wait for concluding remarks, but, damn. 6 Certainly Alexa in Sketchtasy falls into one such “imaginative life schedule,” one of drugs, sex work, and unmoored gender and sexual identity. Perhaps Annabel in Tiny Pieces of Skull represents another, again one in which sex work is a complicated mixture of necessity, desire, and gender affirmation…come to think of it, Paul and Wendy both trade in these schedules. Sex work may actually hold a distinctive position in the temporal markers of this minor literature. A note likely needs to be made (not this one, as it stands!) regarding the ways in which sex work (and perhaps substance use) contribute to the knot of time in this minor literature.

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or queerness constitute (or needs constitute) a coherent, monolithic subject position. As

Halberstam writes, a variety of people “will and do opt to live outside reproductive and familial

time as well as on the edge of logics of labor and production” (QTP, 10). Some of the great

moments in this minor literature, those that would be described as heroic in positive

comparison with defiant and triumphant hero(in)es across Western literature, are those in

which this opting-out is the most costly, and often the most selfish—from the perspective of

the Master—in the sense of survival being an insufficient condition of persistence. Among

Halberstam’s “queer subjects” one could count sex working people, houseless people, drug

selling and trading people, and others without formal, or any, waged employ. It goes almost

without saying that the queer and trans characters of this minor literature tick all of these

boxes at various instances, and never do so as a melodramatic ploy for sympathy or tragic

identification. These subjects are, as Halberstam enumerates, queer in the ways they live,

during hours when others sleep, in spaces others have abandoned, working in domains others

(read: the Master) assign to privacy and family, and whose time and space are “limned by risks

they are willing to take.” This willingness is, of course, relative to the degree of agency most

subjects have under late-stage capitalism and neoliberal logics, but it also defies victimization

narratives that persist in these logics. As Nicola Mai put it earlier, and in an example of what

Elizabeth Bernstein terms “moral gentrification,”7 this is the abolitionist logic: “end demand”

for sex work, for houselessness, for vagrancy, for unemployment, for drugs, and they will

disappear. But the referent of this “they” is not simply the practice, it is the person, and

7 Another deep well to drop a bucket into…need to at least cite this reference from Brokered Subjects. This is another prong in the argument that abolitionist logics—those that see “end demand” as a valid strategy to drive people out of criminalized labor—is very much akin to TERF and other transphobic thinking.

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“disappear,” in that instance, means in no uncertain terms: die. When Halberstam writes—a

decade, a pronoun shift, and a dead name later—of queerness as a contrary temporal logic (T*,

86), the risks in embodying this logic have only intensified. After Wendy survives a potentially

violent transphobic encounter, she wonders if it’s bad that she wasn’t scared, as “there was a

time in her life when she would’ve been” (LF, 31). Kaveney’s Annabelle makes an even more

overt choice to wield not the violence itself, but its constant presence in her life as a means of

survival. The threat of what she represents, as trans woman, sex worker, and underclass

extends to almost any who would harm her: rough clients, cops, even other members of the

underworld through which she navigates. She will not die on their terms, and when that

violence gets too near to her and hers, she finally returns to London.

Halberstam’s queer art of failure recognizes the danger or even impossibility of the

parallel infinite, as it “involves the acceptance of the finite” (QF, 187). Thinking of time as

proximal and performative, might free it from heteronormative progress narratives. Elizabeth

Freeman sees these phenomena in terms of the potentiality of desire, as she notes the durative

possibilities in needful relationality. She writes that “longing produces modes of both

belonging and ‘being long’ or persisting over time” (TB, 13). This study has noted the power of

persistence and its modularity with resistance, and Freeman analogously notes that longing is

more than desire, in that it stands as belief in a referential object which one lacks. The belief

presses past even the most directed desire, it looks much more akin to the lack expressed by

Jack Sheppard and Bess’s mutual, if not exactly reciprocal, romantic relation. Freeman expands

the notion in a formulation of a piece with Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-lover,” which she

cites as “a way to ‘overwhelm’ the heterosexualized elements of ‘constituents’ of attraction and

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desire: not only the supposedly natural continuum from female anatomy to feminine self-

identification to desire for the opposite sex to pregnancy and childbirth but also the sequential,

irreversible, teleological time that orders and gives meaning to this continuum” (TB, 53). This

does indeed read like a description of Jack and Bess, especially as they discover longing in each

other that they perhaps never knew they had. A belief that is vague, indistinct, noted only by

virtue of absence, becomes realized and alters each of their perceptions of time. Bess

meditates on Jack’s “adult” pleasure, in contradistinction to that of the childish cis men she has

as clients: “his relentless and slightly irking masculine Composure; his body’s foreclosed

relationship to time, to traveling backwards, to becoming a child again in pleasure” (CF, 97,

author’s capitalization). Jack is, in heteronormative, cis-chronology, younger than any of Bess’s

clients, yet his body’s persistence in or against time is “foreclosed.” This might mean

unhurried, it might mean waiting, it might mean abnegating, it might carry a variety of other

definitions. Bess presses on: “did it exhaust him, this untouchable adulthood?” But she sees

that his ardor for her is dauntless, it certainly transcends even the most obsessive consideration

of desire, and it has to do with a rejection not just of the past, but pastness as a whole—

somewhat ironic for what is ostensibly a historical novel with a modernist temporal twist. Bess

decides that Jack won’t be “undone in just this way,” of throwing himself “back into the arms of

the past.” But what past would await him, anyway, and would these arms not attempt to crush

him for his transgression against them? Bess still cannot completely figure it as she notes Jack’s

“body’s relationship to Retrospection. Or Lack thereof” (CF, 96). The relationship is as much

that of the strangeness and newness of his body as its familiarity and thrilling comforts. When

Freeman notes that the “primary work of queer performativity” is to “construct and circulate

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something like an embodied temporal map […] a closet full of gendered possibilities” (TB, 71),

Jack Sheppard dons a few of those possibilities, and discards a few others. Femininity is no

more the enemy than masculinity is the goal8; the former is simply the nonexistent, ordained

past, and the latter is the endless present, as it connects Jack, in his mind, to Bess. As the full

heft of their revolutionary activities become clear, and London grows commensurately more

dangerous for a trans masc thief and a racial minority prostitute, Bess is forced to encounter

and run from the law more directly than she has perhaps ever needed to in her position in the

underworld of the city. As Bess literally runs from the cops, “she was falling out of time—

emerging into a different one” (CF, 180), a queer failure that can be, as Halberstam puts it,

recognized without needing to be redeemed (QF, 99).

T Fleischmann writes of falling into a different time through desire-become-longing, as

they detail “an orgy of two that lasts for days,” which is an elegant seeming-contradiction that

notes the multiplicative potential in queer desire. Fleischmann finds the nonparallel in these

days, which render a “splitting open of time, in the way erotic time is composed of infinite

moments” (TT, 18). Muñoz notes the delimited potential of atomistic time as well: “moments

of queer relational bliss […] having the ability to rewrite a larger map of everyday life” (CU, 25).

In his utopian view, this map includes or is dominated by queer, trans, and other minoritarian

subjects, those who cannot be found on the Master’s maps, and he famously champions

ephemerality as a weapon and a signifier of the minoritarian subject who is illegible to the

8 Monique Wittig, in what could, in the context of this study, be read as a swipe TERFism, notes “Matriarchy is no less heterosexual patriarchy” (“One is Not Born a Woman, 2), and furthermore, women and men are political and economic categories, “not eternal ones” (6). In a related formulation, Paul B Preciado rather cheekily refers to the dangers of “matriotism” (AU, 93).

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longue durée of heteronormative history. Juliana Huxtable, perhaps pessimistically, notes a

certain death of this utopia in the figure of the screencap—recognizing the prominence of the

internet as information source, curiosity, self-expression, and database (especially for sex work

and trading). Huxtable writes that the screencap has “made everything permanent,

ephemerality a mere illusion” (MPG, 47). Is this observation a circular recursion? Is the

ephemeral illusory by definition, or is it simply that illusions are ephemeral? The latter seems

patently false: illusions persist in the Master’s rendering of minoritarian subjects, often for

generations. As minor literature forwards various challenges to heteronormative time, what

they have in common is a detonating of chrono-linearity/chrononormativity and progress

narratives determined by heteronormative, reproductive goals. Fleischmann returns us to the

subject at hand: “I distrust linearity, but bodies can seem like one of the only linear things—age,

getting bigger and then smaller, death” (TT, 59). The “seem” is important here as it is doubly

inflected: do bodies only seem to be linear, or do they seem to be one of the only linear things

when in fact there are more? But Fleischmann continues, somewhat staking a claim in the

discussion which opened this section, “Another reason to appreciate the transitioning body,

which ages backwards, every person seeming to become younger, with or without taking

hormones. It’s a good reminder that the body was never linear in the first place.” Well, that

seems to answer that. It takes the existence and persistence of trans bodies to point out

something that was true all along, that the body is in fact not a linear thing, and thus, in a kind

of bodily anti-cogito, perhaps nothing is at all.

The time of this minor literature, as expressed in this corpus of novels, challenges the

Master’s (and mastery’s) design. The vessels for these challenges include, first, an expanded

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consideration of history and past(-ness), both bodily and narrative. From there, notes on the

relative paucity of the temporal concerns regarding the present and future—perhaps these

terms are themselves too heteronormative or speculative to hold. These include digressions on

memory and forgetting, and the ways in which these bear upon or enact the classic novelistic

tropes of family and inheritance, and childhood or adolescence. Finally, sketches regarding the

daily or quotidian, and fantasy, each of which serves to measure some of the

deterritorializations presented in the minor literature. In the spirit of failure, these concerns

aspire to remaining unresolved, open to interpretation and revision, and deeply unsatisfying.

On History(s), Past(-ness), and Contact with/Avoidance thereof

Confessions of the Fox is this study’s “historical” novel. It is a history in the traditional

narratological sense, tracing the development of a character in his time; it is a historical novel in

the Lukácsian sense, with its “real” historical personages alongside a tale of human

development; and it is a history of the time of its writing as well, with its thoroughly

contemporary narrator, Voth. Yet Jack Sheppard’s own sense of history is so embodied as to be

completely personal, and as Voth nears and then joins the Stretchers, history itself becomes the

obsession of the novel: who gets to have one, who gets to alter them, who owns the narrative,

and can a narrative can be owned. Novels are not ephemeral. They can be lost to publication

inactivity, active suppression, or pre-publication manuscript, just as they can be “found,” a

status represented here by Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull. But the promise (or warning) of

archivists who alter their archives as do Rosenberg’s Stretchers threatens to render all written

history as fungible and unreliable as much of it already routinely proves to be. Kai Cheng

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Thom’s narrator is, as has been noted, a Notorious Liar, promising only that the lies have a

purpose which hews closer to truth than the Master’s objectivity ever could.

The work of the Stretchers—a reference perhaps to stretching the truth, but also to

expanding and deforming linear time and history—can be accounted as a metanarrative for

minor literature’s recording of its time, especially as the majority of these narratives are very

much of their time, and very much not of an un- or re-written historical past. The archivists

“have been writing the history” of their separation from “us” (CF, n267). It is important that

they are on the aforementioned nonparallel timeline, not because it gives them a bird’s eye

view of history—perhaps a more Foucauldian view of the archive—nor because it allows them

to dialogue with it—though a Derridean reading of archive would say that the Stretchers are

doing some versions of that, as the “original” writers cannot respond. It is instead vital to their

project that they are outside the public spheres which berthed the works at hand, neither

acquiescing to nor needing to resist the Master’s demands. The Stretchers’ ethos can be

summarized as “All history should be the history of how we exceeded our own limits,” a

sentiment that requires a praxis of amendment and emendation, though, it seems, never

excision9. This type of archive is additive and expanding, excessive by definition as it is the

result of a group with a shared set of aims who are altering and adding to assumedly

“complete” accounts, such as Sheppard’s. The Stretchers’ sense of a bodily history is

“breathing air into a previously unfelt opening,” a perception which requires a certain openness

9 Voth’s own seeming unwillingness to include a diagram of the chimeric genitals notwithstanding. He does not have the illustration to begin with, as is pleasantly impressed/surprised that it was not included in the manuscript at hand. Or, at the very least, he does not share it with his readers, even in confidence. But he does not leave much sense that he is at all withholding from “us.”

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to feeling things previously unfelt. This project becomes even more immediately personal for

trans man Voth, as he writes “there is the medical history that purports to linearity (a kind of

endochronology—a so-called progress narrative of the alignment of sex hormones and

subjectivity, if you will). And then there is our history—fragmented and fugitive” (CF, n301).

The “us” from whom the Stretchers have separated has become the “our” of the history they

are (re)writing. It is fragmented in the way that Blanchot read Nietzsche10, deriving power from

the negative spaces and false assumptions into which it tricks the uninitiated or

overcommitted. The medicalization of the progress narrative is as good a phobic public sphere

to select as any, and Sheppard’s status as curiosity both in his own time and ours is an

inescapable element of the history(s) he represents.

Jose Esteban Muñoz uses disidentification to deterritorialize history. He suggests that

the temporality of disidentification can help resist the ahistorical erasure inherent in the

“burden of liveness,” which offers the observer (or, in considering literature, reader) access to

queer life-worlds that exist, importantly and dialectically, within the future and the present (D,

198). This burden of liveness is one that mandates telling a specific sort of story, and while a

theorist could conjure up tropes and schematics for a majoritarian trans literature, it by and

large does not exist. The Bildungsroman of trans fiction simply does not satisfy and even seems

to scoff at the strictures of the form, not least its historicity. Muñoz, considering history for the

disidentificatory subject, continues: “a subject is not locating” their “essential history by

researching [their] racial or cultural past; what is to be located is in fact just one more identity

bit that constitutes the matrix that is hybridity” (D, 83). The hybrid subject is not simply one

10 See for example “The Fragment Word” in Blanchot’s Infinite Conversation.

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who experiences intersectional contacts with majoritarian public spheres. Rather, they are ill-

fit in their hybridity, the roles and personae available to them far more unitary and prefab. The

ways in which one reads this element of minoritarian history and identity could be myriad. For

Muñoz, the reading is performative: the spectacles of “the enactments of the hybrid self” in

performance “offer the minoritarian subject a space to situate itself in history and thus seize

social agency” (D, 1). Utopia, at least at this moment in Muñoz’s corpus, means agential action

in response to erasure, smothering, dismissal. Performance is an immediate, visceral, tactile

response, but literature is at least as fit to leave a historical mark, a self-validating arc with at

least two of beginning, middle, and end. History is an element of revolutionary potential as

well. Muñoz suggests that (imagined) history lends itself to a collective struggle: identity-

affirming melancholia can be used to “map the ambivalence of identification and the conditions

of (im)possibility that shape” minoritarian identities (D, 74). This melancholic dimension to

affirming identity is interesting, and perhaps perplexing coming from the philosopher

(evangelist?) of queer utopia. But if melancholia is read as identification with a history that

never was, and thus striving for a horizon which is deeply personal in its collectivity, then the

ambivalence is more than understandable. Conditions of (im)possibility are part and parcel to

utopia, an imagining which overcomes the threshold of the horizon and exhausts the time that

remains. Muñoz rephrases: disidentificatory history is born between “necessary militancy and

indispensable mourning” (ibid).

Another way to read hybridity is bodily, or even boditarian. Freeman writes of

erotohistoriography as “a way of imagining the ‘inappropriate’ response of eros in the face of

sorrow as a trace of past forms of pleasure” (TB, 120). Marking history (sometimes quite

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literally, as Freeman explores the durative and therapeutic capacities of S&M and bondage) via

pleasure and pain is almost on-the-nose when registering trans minor literature, but is not less

useful for so being. Freeman sees this historiography as transcending the individual, another

echo of everything in minor literature possessing a collective value. She remarks on queer

relations’ great capacity to intervene in the material damage of progress or civilization, an

intervention based on the hybrid subject’s being mis-fit in history. For Freeman, though, this

mis-fitting is embodied, as historical and temporal disjunction experienced as illicit pleasure

define and enable queer sociability (TB, 122). History experienced as illicit pleasure, a positive

marker to operate alongside the traumas experienced by virtue of histories of exclusion or

erasure. This hybridity in/alongside/out of history drives time in this minor literature.

Freeman presses on with this conception of pleasure, noting that contact with the past

can be as “meeting a sensate body,” resulting in a “revivifying and pleasurable effect” (TB, 105).

But before risking being lost to the slipstream of metaphysics, Freeman offers a heuristic.

“Bottomy historiography” offers the potential for collective queer time or history “to be

structured as an uneven transmission of receptivity rather than authority or custom, of a

certain enjoyably porous relation to unpredictable futures or to new configurations of the past”

(TB, 109). This historiography can be read as deterritorializing inheritance and history, moving

the former away from definite familial or genetic bonds, out of the public spheres of law,

medicine, and religion, and into personal/collective reception. It is “bottomy” in its apparent

unevenness, but there is some provocation in this characterization as well; erotohistoriography

is concerned with the defamed, the inappropriate, the illicit, and the ambivalent—each of

which is itself ripe for deterritorialization. To be defamed is to be recognized and publicly

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fallen, a condition which indicts that public as much as the fallen subject; to be inappropriate is

to reveal the obverse of propriety, to threaten to revaluate values and the ways in which they

fail to match up with assumed universal experiences; to be illicit is to be made aware of who

exactly has license to do what, and which contexts threaten the validity thereof; but worst of

all, to be ambivalent is to refuse to either integrate or abscond, a subject position the Master

cannot abide.

And yet, dehistoricizing is unquestionably one of the Master’s tools. The phobic public

spheres derive a sense of removing from history that which does not fit the progress narrative,

just as Halberstam reminds us in his list of majoritarian motivations for telling trans stories. So

rather than sacrificing history, be it personal or collective, Halberstam proposes “perverse

presentism” (FM, 52) as an alternative model of historical inquiry and analysis. This

deterritorializing gesture happens in stages: questioning what we think we know, then what we

think we have found. Each of these stages is predicated on recognizing the primacy of “what

we think,” rather than any empiricist desire to assert what is, let alone even what is or can be

known. Proceeding from knowledge-building as a process of what we—and it must be we—

think we know threatens to become wholly individual and pluralistic, save for this collective

“we.” Thus, perverse presentism proceeds from the negative of knowledge-building, moving to

the application of what we do not know in the present to what we cannot know about the past.

In many ways, Little Fish is the novel which most proceeds from the frustration and liberation of

this unknowability. The revelation of Wendy’s grandfather’s queerness—and possible

unrealized/unrealizable fulfillment as trans woman—moves from shocking, to desperate, to

identificatory, to disidentificatory. Wendy does not come to any grand realization, either about

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her queer lineage or herself, really, a non-occurrence which would be unacceptable in a

majoritarian literature of progress. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Tiny Pieces of Skull’s

Annabelle is interested, for the majority of the novel, in cutting the umbilical anchor of her

past, emblematized equally by her sudden and unanticipated acquisition of breasts, and move

abroad from London to Chicago. But in both instances, the femme protagonists take part in

what Halberstam describes as de-linking the process of generation from the force of

(majoritarian) historical process. Generation for Wendy is the bonds between her chosen

family creating space for a renewed relationship with both her father and her absent

(deceased) grandfather. Generation for Annabelle is slightly more survivalist, but as the novel is

A Lesson in Manners, there is the distinct sense of culture and acculturation, freed from the

superciliousness of history as portrayed in, say, Wharton or Proust11. Her lineage feels almost

nonexistent, self-generating and building from zero, save for Mexica, the trans femme elder

who looms offscreen until the very end of the novel. But every one of the trans characters in

this minor literature participates in what Halberstam terms the “dilemma” of trans characters:

“to create an alternate future while rewriting history” (QTP, 77).

Rewriting is the great interventionist weapon of Confession of the Fox’s archivist

Stretchers. As the potential scope of their work comes into sharper relief, the professor

narrator Voth speculates further on his own project in editing and annotating the account of

Jack Sheppard: “History does not progress, but rather piles and strews—a chaos of

heterogenous shards” (CF, n310). This historiography changes the topography of an archival

project. Rather than rifling through index cards and documents, organized chronologically,

11 Comparisons rendered more apt by the multiple references to each in Kaveney’s novel.

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geographically, even topically, one must instead match up shards, potentially or even likely

reconfiguring them into shapes and patterns not originally intended—because there was no

original intention. But the presence of Sheppard and Bess in the archive pays down their

assertion that “History will find us. History will avenge us all.” (CF, 314), “us all” being the

freebooters and mutineers of history, and this history is both bodily and one of bodies. Voth’s

revolutionary fervor intensifies exponentially in the final act of his transcription, and thus his

presence in (as opposed to alongside or parallel to) the tale is clarified. He writes, “There is no

trans body, no body at all—outside” the “broad and awful legacy” of “the terrible history” of

“policing and colonialism” (CF, n315). But this is, for Voth, just the “first history.” It may not

even be the Master’s history, as the history of policing, colony, and empire does not move the

phobic public a whit; the results and the non-perverse present is all that obtains. “The second

history is love’s inscription,” continues Voth, an inscription of a battle, including but hardly

limited to the Stonewall riots. Muñoz writes that queer restaging of the past helps to “imagine

new temporalities that interrupt straight time” (CU, 171), and the interruption here is a

moment of trans resistance in a legacy of anti-trans violence. Voth is protective of the history

of Sheppard first out of some indistinct resistance to the public spheres of the academy and

capitalism’s other superstructures. But by the end, his own history has converged with that of

Sheppard in a manner that has little to do with identification, and much to do with collective

strength and solidarity. And this is not the only genre of interruption.

Voth’s romantic and sexual histories weave through the footnotes he appends to the

Sheppard narrative. He has only one (potentially) amative encounter during the chronology of

his editing, and it is both abortive and ultimately a subterfuge—the object of his affection is

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paid to get information out of him. But Voth gives his reader a bit of his own romantic history,

detailing his legendary ex-partner of song and story, a trope with which the romantically active

can in many cases so easily identify. He writes a version of Gayle Salamon’s truism: “the body is

always subtended by its history” (AB, 78). Voth offers, “when a woman touches you, when she

recasts your body in the flame of love, that fire is itself a spark thrown off a much larger blaze.

Some distant incandescence called history. Some history of which, it turns out, you are a part.

Some history to which you’re responsible” (CF, n169, author’s emphasis). This impassioned set

of remarks emerges far enough into the novel that readers ought not to have any expectations

of Voth’s detachment from the work or subject matter at hand, and yet he has not necessarily

offered such candid proclamations regarding his history to this point. He suggests a haptic

historicity, distant but tactile, inclusive yet experienced individually, and, most importantly,

soliciting responsibility. He feels responsible to the Sheppard story, sure, but this passage reads

much more akin to the responsibility to the reader previously noted in minor literature. There

are stakes, and there is a level of discretion which in fact requires such candor. Fleischmann

offers another take on bodily history as they ask, and then immediately amend, “what can one

do with a past? What I mean is, what can we do with our bodies?” (TT, 9). The past, history, is

perhaps relevant only insofar as it offers answers to the latter question. A radically bodily

history radically impacts what a novel can and should do with and in time—Fleischman’s own

title belies duration’s imbrication in bodies. Fleischmann later notes “My relationship to who I

was is tenuous” (TT, 87), a curious note that seems rather mundane outside the context of this

slice-of-life personal history-cum-creative essay they are writing. And still it seems worth

wondering: “Is this true of all people?” (ibid).

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It is true of those who are potentially unseen, or who lack the locus to decide when they

are seen and how. The tenuousness could too-easily be seen as a lack or weakness in the

minoritarian subject’s history, tenuous-because-indistinct, but this is at best a simplification and

more likely simply incorrect. When Kai Cheng Thom’s narrator in Fierce Femmes and Notorious

Liars speculates on the history of her consent, she notes: “All my yeses and nos haven’t been

seen in years and years” (FF, 171). The voice is passive, leaving unclear who would or would

not be doing the seeing, and, further, whether not being seen means not existing at all. The

yeses and nos may not have been needed, or they may not have been seen/read as consent or

refusal. History has rendered them absent so that they can been “seen” again in this present.

Voth writes of his legendary ex that, just as Bess does Jack, “maybe” she “saw me in all my

historicity too” (CF, n226). It is a distinction with a difference: she does not need to see his

history, all the little bits from the past that make him who he is, but his historicity, the ways in

which he is historical. The historicity of the minoritarian subject is tenuous for the majoritarian,

sure: it is legible only insofar it meets with a logic of representation, diversity, “good”

victimhood, and a catalyst for change and progress, always progress. But Voth’s “maybe” is the

paradox: the minoritarian subject cannot be sure that they have been seen in this way, perhaps

because they have been told—had proven to them—that this historicity is itself a chimera.

Minor literature attempts to see minoritarian subjects in their historicity, to deterritorialize

them and often to resist reterritorialization, to write them into a different, if fluidly, painfully,

annoyingly intersecting history.

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Future/(Present)

Torrey Peters proclaimed it, in no uncertain terms: “In the future, everyone will be

trans” (IYFLO, 15). Whether one reads this statement as wishful or threatening, u/dystopic,

hilarious or plaintive, may be a Rorschach for their position in or amongst the phobic public

spheres. The future in much of this minoritarian literature is a zephyr, not to be held or looked

at too directly, for fear it dissolves, or else the very present, if often latent, violence of the

moment should foreclose the future altogether. Confessions of the Fox is, ultimately, utopic for

Jack and Bess, but Voth’s victory is removing himself from “our” timeline and

archiving/annotating with the Stretchers—a future dependent on being permanently out of

time. The future is blank in the majority of this minor literature— in Little Blue Encyclopedia,

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, The Masker, Sketchtasy, Fierce Femmes, and Nevada,

what comes next is anyone’s guess, leaving the reader with the conclusion that, as likely as not,

nothing will. Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is set in a determined future, one in which

Peters’ abovementioned proposition has come to pass. Perhaps only Tiny Pieces of Skull and

Little Fish give the reader the sense that everything is going to be all right, life will go on, there

will be some sort of future, though nothing is in place which will definitively stop the past from

recurring.

In a certain sense, “no future” is the simplest answer to the unasked question. Lee

Edelman’s polemic borrows its title—perhaps unwittingly—from the coda refrain (and original

title) of the Sex Pistols’ second single, 1977’s “God Save the Queen.” The song was pure

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provocation, a kind of art stunt with no particular political ethos12, released during the Queen’s

Silver Jubilee for maximum outrage. When Johnny Rotten repeatedly guarantees “no future for

me, no future for you” over the descending distorted guitars, he’s singing of a certain stripe of

art school disaffection, one which his peers answered in a wide variety of manners. The other

“Class of ‘77” British punk bands to release singles in close proximity ranged from the proto-

Goth/New Romantic darkness of The Damned and Siouxsie and the Banshees, to the politicized,

reggae-appropriating Clash or Slits, to the mod revivalist Jam. In the Little Blue Encyclopedia

(for Vivian), Vivian’s sister offers an alternative history of first-wave punk, listing bands that had

the punk attitude/style (“state of mind”) she appreciated growing up (Raincoats, Adverts,

Avengers, X-Ray Spex)—all of which were woman-fronted or with a significant femme member

(LB, 30). This subtle reclamation of British punk for women and femmes is notable not

primarily as counter-representation, but for the startling diversity of music those four groups

represent under the aegis of “punk rock.” Of the lot, only Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex would be

the kind of heroic frontperson on the level of Joe Strummer, Dave Vanian, or, indeed, Johnny

Rotten. These were gang bands, inventive and incendiary without an angry young white man

sucking up all the air in the room at the fore.13 “No future” meant, essentially across the board,

a Tory government which mirrored the neoliberal Reagan regime soon to come in the US,

12 This has arguably continued today for Lydon (née Rotten), as he makes provocative statements about his appreciation for Trump’s audacity while being forced to condemn some of his policies. Lydon would likely be the first to claim: don’t get your politics from musicians. And yet so much of British punk and American hardcore to follow was concerned with a particular set of reactions to the Thatcher and Reagan regimes. Perhaps the Sex Pistols were unique in their making an aesthetic out of anarchy, though Crass (see “White Punks on Hope”) and Mekons (see “Never Been in a Riot”) would accuse the Clash, a group almost certainly taken more seriously for their politics, of doing the same just a few years later. 13 We could add Crass and Poison Girls to this list—the women in those groups (Joy De Vivre/Eve Libertine/Gee Vaucher, and Vi Subversa, respectively) were front and center to their aesthetics, lyrics, politics, and voice.

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manufactured political tensions in the form of the Falklands war and nuclear brinksmanship,

and a rising xenophobic tide in the guise of the National Front. To an artist, there was no future

because the promises of the past were unfulfilled, two steps forward and a limitless cavern into

which to fall back. Edelman does not, for his part, suggest that there is no future for these

apocalyptic reasons,14 instead detailing how a politics of The Child and a future which presumes

progeny and the protection thereof excludes and erases queer folks.

Edelman notes that futurism “generates generational succession, temporality, and

narrative sequence,” not towards change, but to perpetuate sameness: “to assume a logic of

resemblance […] in the service of representation and, by extension, desire” (NF, 60). This

mélange of terms prompts a few deterritorializing combinations in the continued expansion of

the field of possibility for trans minor literature and time. Edelman is of course correct that the

sense of a future is a necessary precondition for the concepts of succession and sequence,

insofar as they each mark progress in time. But his more radical claim is the way in which the

future of The Child (inevitably the Master’s Child) generates a narrative sequence perpetuating

sameness and representation via a logic of resemblance. If time marches unidirectionally

forward according to heteronormative (chrononormative) markers, towards the telos of The

Child, then it necessarily excludes any difference which cannot be measured according to

degree of resemblance to The Family. Edelman has even broader political claims in mind,

accusing this heteronormative time of mortgaging our present to “a fantasmatic [sic] future in

the name of political ‘capital’ that children will become” (NF, 112, author’s emphasis). “Capital”

14 Again Crass (a couple of years on from the founding of British punk) and the ways in which the anarcho-punk movement may have been a more apt foil for Edelman’s thinking. The nuclear blast in the middle of “They’ve Got A Bomb” feels more akin to Edelman’s manifesto than the Pistols floating down Thames to irritate the royals.

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should be read here as a clear mark of child-as-commodity, and Child as capitalist base;

Edelman sees this future as entirely at the expense of the present of those whose persistence is

least assured by the phobic public spheres. Namely, “the stigmatized other in general can

endanger our idea of the future, conjuring the intolerable image of its spoliation or pollution,

the specter of its being appropriated for unendurable ends” (NF, 113). The spoiled or polluted

position is that of the minoritarian subject. In a screed which manages to direct attention to

the concept of child-bearing as a deeply narcissistic, conservative, selfish act, at least before the

horizon of radical revolution, there is some optimism here. The future as appropriable is

endemic to minoritarian literature. In its general open-endedness, this minor literature refuses

to foreclose the future with a sunset or a gravestone, frustrating a heteronormative, Child-

oriented futurity. In Little Fish, Wendy considers for a moment the prospect of a future with

Ernie, the one romantic interest she entertains in the months of the novel’s duration: “She did

want to live, she did, she just didn’t want to live that long, and she didn’t want to take care of

anybody, anybody anybody anybody” (LF, 60). This first couplet is the unacceptable one, the

polluted timeline of a protagonist who wants not necessarily to choose her own expiration, but

certainly feels it shouldn’t be without end. And, furthermore, there shouldn’t be anyone left

behind who has been cared for to carry on in her stead. The first anybody could be Ernie, the

second his (possible) child, the third any other family or relation for whom she might be made

responsible, and the fourth, herself.

That said, the end of the novel does have a kind of future and it’s not exactly “for there

she was.” After the non-revelation regarding her grandfather’s sexuality and gender

expression, the death of one of her chosen family, and the dull non-event of her loss of a

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straight job, Wendy “felt okay about where her life was headed” (LF, 293). This could be the

closing line of most novels under discussion here, an irksome lack of epiphanic or devastated

resolution. This in a certain sense is the revolutionary potential of minor literature. Utopia is

suggested in small moments of joy and overcoming, as well as notes on the impossibility (and

perhaps undesirability) of persisting under the Master’s crop and the approbation of the phobic

publics.

Jose Esteban Muñoz, perhaps the first notable queer theory respondent to Edelman,

acknowledges that he agrees with much of the fire of No Future. He is, however, faced with a

dilemma in swallowing its conclusions whole, as, for him, “the present is not enough” (CU, 27),

and in fact, we must “wrest ourselves from the present’s stultifying hold” (CU, 28). Is Edelman,

however, the presentist evangelist Muñoz makes him out to be? The latter reads the former as

anti-utopian in his apparent disavowal of any future, and on could speculate if the same charge

would (or could) be levied at the (non)future suggested by this minor literature. There certainly

is no trans News from Nowhere to be found in this minor literature. But then, Muñoz is all

about performativities, and minor literature performs its collective politics in ways that do not

depend on the future being any better than the present. No Future is highly performative as

well, which Muñoz must realize, as it deploys high harangue to combat the absolute

pervasiveness of The Child. Edelman is not, any more than the writers of this minor literature, a

nihilist, operating strictly from abnegation and disavowal—really, not even disillusion, as he is

pretty explicit about what can, what might, and what should change.

It is funny to consider a narrative literature’s unwillingness or inability to write utopia.

This study holds that there are no truly revolutionary politics that are not horizonal, and if that

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horizon does not include the better (if not the good) life, then its ethos should be severely

interrogated. But does that necessarily invoke Ernst Bloch’s claim, quoted in Muñoz: “the

essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present” (CU, 37), which Muñoz takes

Edelman as disallowing with his criticism? The work is certainly not called Yes Present, either,

as Edelman’s entire issue with the future of The Child is its impact on the present. It is a never-

reachable sort of utopia, talking a big game about living for the next generation while neoliberal

precepts of growth and representation (seek to) destroy the polluted or degraded subjects of

the present. But this is the function of utopia, not necessarily its form; Muñoz has something a

bit more specific in mind, a deterritorialization of utopia from forestalled future to reimagined

present. In this version, queer world-making “hinges on the possibility to map a world where

one is allowed to cast pictures of utopia and to include such pictures in any map of the social”

(CU, 40). Novels in any form are world maps, but few are predicated on rules and allowances,

other than those they themselves create. Minor literature acknowledges the world of its

production, certainly, as it must note the majority and its phobic public spheres in order to

distinguish its own world(s). But Muñoz’s allowance here is double: not only must the

possibility to map a world with pictures of utopia be exercised, but also these pictures must be

included in not just one, but any, map of the social. This utopia is one of (self)recognition over

willful misrecognition, selfrepresentation or representativeness, and perhaps world-occupying

above simply/solely world-making/mapping. In some ways, Little Blue Encyclopedia is the most

direct world-mapping intervention amongst the novels at hand, creating, as it does, a universe

of popular culture which threads through the one at hand. Why doesn’t Plante choose a band,

or a film, or a series of books, or a television series that has been produced in reality to tell her

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story of longing for the departed Vivian? Because the world must be made and mapped before

it can be occupied, and as her narrator begins to fully discover and embody “Zelda,” the name

given her by Viv, she invents the “Little Blue” she requires.

Muñoz is not, however, taking the easy (reductive) way out, which would be to say: the

present is a horror show, and thus we must proceed as if the future can and will be better

through our actions. This would be the progressivist, transcendentalist narrative that the

neoliberal Master peddles: everything will (continue to) improve, because it always has. Muñoz

offers Lauren Berlant’s “dead citizenship” of heterosexuality as another take on Edelman’s

desire to “opt out” of the “sacrifice of the present for a fantasmatic”—that word again—

“future” (CU, 49). The answer, then, is utopianism predicated on a critique of the present,

presumably rather than a sacrifice thereof. Muñoz invokes CLR James’s “future in the present”

as a disruption of the binary of present and future, but it remains unclear how this counters the

rallying cry of “no future”—what is the present Muñoz is attempting to save? Minor literature

is full of moments of joy, and not only “stolen” joy, but joy as resistance, joy as persistence, joy

as self-generated—chosen family, liberated desire, anti-determinist determination. Muñoz’s

most direct swipe at Edelman is his avowal that “the future is only the stuff of some kids” (CU,

95), but that may be precisely the point. Kai Cheng Thom’s fierce femme narrator writes about

every manner of (unlikely) plans to her little sister, “once I’ve got all this transition stuff worked

out” (FF, 31-32), but there are a couple of obvious counterfactuals here. First, she’s writing

from exile, self-imposed or not, living out the fantasy of running away alongside the femmes

who have also run away, opted out, into the same dream of big cities as so many others—the

difference here being the way in which she relishes the violence of the present. Working out

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her stuff cannot mean returning home to rescue little sis. Second, and more important, “this

transition stuff” is never worked out in minor literature—that is the future, the horizon. Not a

world of acceptance, though that would be lovely and often is when it is found, but a world

wherein experiments and attempts without predetermined ends are allowed. This world

cannot be completely mapped, because it allows for a perpetual transition of

selfrepresentation—even if that perpetuity is not exercised. Part of the latent revolutionary

potential is operating as if this future can be grasped. The other futures with which Thom’s

narrator experiments are equally wild when considered in comparison to her Lipstick Lacerators

and street-fighting skill. She muses on becoming a Transgender Power Couple, concluding:

“And the thing is, I want that” (FF, 179, author’s emphasis). As important and liberatory as the

relationship in question is, the narrator still needs to convince the reader (and herself) that this

future is desired. The further extension is a deterritorialization of parentage, perhaps slightly

less unlikely: “Maybe someday I’ll play mother to a hundred trans girls of my own” (ibid). And

maybe she will, but that isn’t the point of this or any other novel in this minor literature; it’s far

closer to Thom’s (and her narrator’s) actual conclusion: “I’ll write for the girls who came before,

and the girls who come next” (FF, 188). Is writing for the future sacrificing the past?

Freeman suggests that “teleologies of living” and “time-as-productive” are cases of

“serial cause-and-effect” inheritance and legacy from which a group will draw its political future

(TB, 4, author’s emphases). The concept of legacy is also largely absent from minor literature;

there is little lionization of major figures from any shared lineage, only appreciation for the

survival efforts of others in any community. Paul is a particularly interesting case for this, as he

meets another person who shares his ability to shift sex-gender characteristics, but feels

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neither empowered nor any real kinship as a result. His future (or lack thereof) does not

change even at this seemingly monumental revelation. Even the novels which struggle with

remembering victims of transphobic violence and emotional duress tend not to do so in a

manner that suggests an altered future, other than the absence of those taken by the violence.

The writer of the Little Blue Encyclopedia acutely misses Vivian, but the future does not come

into any sharper focus as a result. Similarly, Sophie’s passing in Little Fish is devastating, but the

tenor of what to do with Wendy’s own “time that remains” is not fundamentally altered. Nor,

finally, do the victims of the AIDS epidemic—which Jack Halberstam notes as revealing a

“constantly diminishing future” for communities most directly and disproportionately impacted

(QTP, 2)—or massive substance abuse end up inexorably changing Alexa’s path: she attends AA

meetings and ends the novel on a soaring pharmaceutical high. Maria Griffiths, whose

resilience in the face of change could be read as easily as despondency as strength, wants to

reject “the poisonous, normative idea that there is a Too Old For Catharsis,” an interesting

concept for someone whose greatest lack in the novel is perhaps her ability to feel and

articulate those feelings—much to the chagrin of those close to her. She continues, “Or really,

a Too Old For Anything. But rejecting normative ideas about age is as hard as rejecting

normative ideas about gender” (N, 105). It’s a neat little de/reterritorializing knot: Maria has

published a mountain of experiences and insights on her (well-read) online journal, and spends

a fair part of the novel speculating on what she thinks she knows, what she actually has

learned, what effect those things have had on her life, and whether any of it is worth passing

on. The difficulties in rejecting normative ideas about gender are, here, her own—an

acknowledgment that one needn’t be a genderfuck guru in order to be a trans person. But the

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sequence, from catharsis, to normative age requirements, to normative gender requirements is

significant. No future means never being Too Old For Anything, which Maria emphasizes as she

consider the trip “a clean break from my life for the last four years, six years, twenty-nine

years” (N, 115).

So, what does a subtended, bodily time have to say about the future? Ambivalence,

abstention, opting-out, refusal—“living for today” is, in one sense, the Master’s duration, as it

requires the privilege of knowing that tomorrow will/might/should come. But living for the

future is equally unavailable, both due to the litany of examples of that future’s unavailability

and the fact that the future is unlikely to be one’s own. In a distinctive sense, within this minor

literature the future becomes present, as characters have chosen at least one fundamental way

in which their future will match their selfrepresentation. Future is embodied in an overt and

“readable” decision to be(come) who one is, and minor literature thus rescales time according

to what one is once they have become, and the extent to which that becoming does or does

not perpetuate.

Memory/Forgetting

Confessions of the Fox and Little Blue Encyclopedia are memorials, of a sort, but they are

each inscribed in a vivid, imagined world which maps onto and alongside the “actual” ones in

which they exist. The narrative of Sheppard prompts Jordy Rosenberg to include an extensive

bibliography, both as regards the historical detail (and speculation) of the period piece, as well

as the abolitionist thinking that colors the final act of the work. “Little Blue,” the fictitious

television show around which the Encyclopedia is lovingly constructed, is populated by actors

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actual and invented, and by dint of its truncated run, auteur director, and enduring fanbase, the

series could suggest any number of cultish references: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Lars Von

Trier’s Riget, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or even Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks.

Hazel Jane Plante builds out a series of interlocking worlds which test her reader’s own research

desires: the director of the program, one of its leading actors, and even a fanzine written about

it tarry with the historical in a manner which can be sufficiently unnerving as to make us

wonder what it would change if Vivian were a real, deceased person. But of course it would

change nothing, and Plante seems to recognize this near the end of the work, wherein she

extends the circumstances around Vivian’s passing to trans women more generally. Rather

than a touching queer memorial—Genet’s Funeral Rites kept asserting itself as a comparison for

me—it becomes representative-without-being-a-stand-in for the fine grain of posthumous

memory, rescaling moments in the narrator’s transition narrative (which would seem to be

momentous) against characters and events in the “Little Blue” series, and some Britpop lyrics to

boot, each so beloved of Vivian.

The entire project of the Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) is born of the dedicatee’s

childhood attempt to memorize a children’s encyclopedia. But rather than complete this heady

task—Vivian gives up halfway through the “A” chapter, according to her sister—she instead

memorializes the book, pasting in images and stickers, drawing in margins, and adding absent

entries (such as “Video Games” under “V”). Thus, the narrator of the novel reterritorializes

Vivian’s deterritorialization of encyclopedia, a genre meant to be as impersonal (or

depersonalized) as possible, even as its standards of inclusion belie the biases of any board of

editors or individual archivist of knowledge. The reterritorialization is a book of memories

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masquerading as an unsolicited alphabetical rendering of a program few watched, and which

most people in Vivian’s life struggled to complete at her urging (LB, 12). If anything mandated

that a minoritarian subject be concerned about their erasure from the phobic public spheres, it

would be the Master’s decree: you will be represented, rendered legible either by comparison

or contradistinction to the heteronormative exemplar, positioned where you can be seen but

not heard, or you will be disappeared.15 But should minor literature not heed this decree,

acting marginally or against it, there lie two, equally appealing, and perhaps ultimately

converging, paths through. The first is the alternative history, one that works against the

progressivist, causal logic of majoritarian history, (re)writing maps and revivifying moments

whose persistence unmakes narratives of polluted or debased subject positions. This approach

could be accused of using the Master’s tools to destroy His house, but those tools are damnably

effective, and may be the nearest available. Susan Stryker’s work on the life of Christine

Jorgenson or the Compton’s Cafeteria riots, Tourmaline’s on Marsha P Johnson or the

antebellum South, or Mona Bear Medicine Crow’s (among others) gallery shows re-

constellating two-spirit people in indigenous history each uses more “academically

conventional” research and archival methods coupled with distinct aesthetic practices to

un/rewrite or de/reterritorialize elements of the Master’s history. The second path, though,

confounds and frustrates even the methods of research and writing via invention,

confabulation, and flat out counterfactual. These efforts, at their most effective, might prompt

red-faced “how could we know that??” rage from those whose employment, both literal and

15 Once having appeared, as if from nowhere, to disappear is to reverse the appearing; to be disappeared is to forcibly be absented.

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figurative, is founded on having ready answers to that question. The answer, for much minor

literature, is either a shrugging “we can’t, of course, because I made it up,” a more pointed

“how can we know anything that isn’t written onto and through our bodies?” or both.

Rosenberg challenges credulity with his Stretching (he invokes both Angela Davis and Oscar

Wilde as Stretchers who might have altered the Sheppard narrative), Lawlor places Paul in the

potboiler of Michfest, Sycamore shoots 90s American urban queer life through a stream of

mind-altering substances, and Plante invents the parallel universe in which “Little Blue” is the

dream program which could bring together Padma Lakshmi and Bruce McCulloch on the small

screen. Gayle Salamon proposes a version of boditarian memory which reads like a kind of

unplanned obsolesce, as the “coherence of the body is only established through reliance on a

layer of accumulated memories whose support is then rendered invisible” (AB, 32). Many of

the characters experience this layer as trauma, but they also embody it as aesthetic experience,

and as chosen family supplanting heteronormative parentage or siblinghood. Plante’s narrator

experiences and remaps her memories of Vivian via iterative re-watching of the latter’s favorite

cultural artifact, the cultish television show, “Little Blue.” She is acutely aware of the

insufficiency of aesthetic experience in filling the void left by a beloved individual, let alone a

fellow minoritarian subject, let alone a kind of cultural, affective, and gender-expressive

mentor. For her, watching “Little Blue” repeatedly was not “a sort of emotional spackle” (LB,

14) that helped fill the gap left by the missing Viv. “Writing about her wasn’t like being with

her,” asserts the narrator, which may seem an obvious statement, but it is one worth noting as

the narrator works through what to do with absence, other than to forget. She continues, “the

truth is it only made me more acutely aware that she was gone, that her thoughts were gone,

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her words were gone, her body was gone. I became increasingly aware of my body, of all the

things I had done in it and all the things I could do in it” (ibid). So, this is in part writing against

forgetting, a not-uncommon function for literature. But minor literature can be oppositional

without being opposite, and in this instance, Vivian’s story is hardly being narrated for

perpetuity or posterity. This is a more impressionistic, fragmentary memory, and one which

increases the acuity and specificity of the loss; again, Genet performs something akin with his

deceased lover Jean in Funeral Rites, becoming overwhelmed with sorrow to the point that he

embodies Jean directly. Rather than writing as or directly through Vivian—as the narrator

acknowledges there was too much she did not, could not, must not know—she becomes a

great fan of Britpop acts Suede and Pulp, and, of course, “Little Blue.” Vivian’s absence is

Zelda’s (the name ultimately bestowed upon her by Viv) presence, and she is granted the kind

of awakening Lawlor’s Paul, Rosenberg’s Jack, or Platt’s Wendy live out firsthand—“all the

things I could do in it” is an epiphany regarding bodies that is vacuous and redundant for the

majoritarian subject.16 The Master’s decree—in law, culture, epistemology, sex, medicine—

names what they can do with their bodies and the ways in which that menu of possibilities is

negotiable. This same decree is inevitably negative for the minoritarian subject: what one

cannot do with their body, and often even some mystical logic as to why. But though she does

not live as/through Vivian, the narrator remembers her through a dualized experience with the

world around her, noting that accruing memories after spending a lot of time with someone

16 The tradition of the revelation in 20th century African American literature is strong as well, from James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man to George Schuyler’s biting Black No More or even Nella Larsen’s Passing. Each centers around positive revelation regarding embodiment of minoritarian and majoritarian characteristics, phenotypes, and conceptions.

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“can be overwhelming, like the world is overlaid with experience” (LB, 93). While it is tempting

to speculate that this phenomenon is illusory, as the experience under consideration is not her

own, there is no question that the narrator is experiencing Viv through “Little Blue,” a

hermeneutic which reveals truths about all three of them. This boditarian experience of writing

as memory-mapping wends through each of these novels, but there are less immediately

tangible experiences of memory-mapping and -remapping here as well. Music is, of course, one

such literally invisible medium that has a marked presence in this minor literature.

Elizabeth Freeman expands on Alison Landsberg’s concept of “prosthetic memory” as

mass-produced experiences disseminated by films and museums to consumers. Surely

musicians and writers of fictive literature could be added to this list of prosthesis-producers.

Landsberg sees this variety of memory, shared by people who have never met, as arising from

bodies engaged in “mimetic activities,” which might be read as “memory-producing activities.”

What each of these novels has in common is an investment in either popular or communitarian

niche cultures, or both. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl requires a doctorate in 90s queer

and pop culture to sift through each of its references, while Little Fish mandates at least some

post-secondary study. Confessions of the Fox has a different, bifurcated set of reference points

between Voth’s contemporary commentary and the text itself. When Freeman suggests that

these kinds of reference points and the memory associated with them can “bind and unbind

historical subjectivity” (TB, 160), minor literature has a unique purchase on this phenomenon.

Binding historical subjectivity to a minoritarian subject position is a deterritorialization of

categories of hero or villain, those with or against whom the (hetero)normative reader is to

identify. The unbinding, then, is a reterritorialization, albeit of a far different register: now the

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cultural memory is made personal in a manner which is unforgiving and does not cotton to any

broader experience. The fact that Lawlor or Kaveney does not footnote their musical or literary

references, does not detail their histories or what they meant to the majoritarian zeitgeist, is

significant. The experiences of hearing a Tribe 8 song or seeing a Bad Brains t-shirt17, or reading

a Proust novel18 or Wojnarowicz memoir19 are not disentangled, gradated, or married to any

specific prosthetic referent. As Freeman says, these prosthetic memories can “counter the

work of the historical monument,” and even the narrator’s burgeoning love of Britpop in Little

Blue Encyclopedia divorces some of its key entries from their monumental referents.20 These

novels all operate without any of the majoritarian cultural references, of course, because they

are in fact prosthetic21. But what this excess means for a texture of communitarian memory

cannot be underestimated. Minor literature is not pure reaction to majoritarian culture and

the Master’s demands; it is navigation and remapping territories designed for exclusion and

17 Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl 18 Tiny Pieces of Skull 19 Sketchtasy 20 See, for instance, the narrator’s quoting of Pulp’s “Mis-Shapes” as a trans anthem, which constitutes a compelling deterritorialization of the significance of the song in its original incarnation: as a double A-side, backed with a song about doing drugs at a festival (“Sorted Out for E’s and Wizz”), and one which established the band as champions of “speccy losers,” as singer and lyricist Jarvis Cocker has termed it. The song was the first track on the “Different Class” album, which was released on the heels of a surprise headlining performance at Glastonbury Festival (where “Mis-Shapes” was debuted in front of many tens of thousands), establishing Pulp, a band with more than a decade under its belt, as a Britpop group of the Oasis and Blur league. None of this would have meant much to all but a thin set of Anglophiles in the early-to-mid 1990s, and even less to those a half-generation late to the party (such as myself—Pulp opened for Blur to 1200 attendees in Chicago, 1994, months before that fateful Glastonbury spot; Blur’s best-selling Parklife was 4x platinum in the UK and did not break 200,000 copies in the US); the prosthesis is a new one for the narrator, especially as the initial deterritorialization is from her Britpop-obsessed comrade, Viv. 21 In the midst of her abovementioned monograph on autotheory, Lauren Fournier (2020) writes of seeking after “a queer literary history of performative citation practices, revealing the ways that citation […] brings together different modes of critical practice to commingle and transform” (135). Here, it is the non-citation (or at least non-explanation) of cultural references which pervades many of these works. Are they sly nods for the initiated, autotheoretical anchors for the author’s own tastes, or simply background texture for “historical” novels concerned with being of their time?

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forced capitulation, and popular music especially rests at an odd juncture which exceeds the

phobic public spheres.

At the same time, perhaps it is the relative lack of “cinematic” memories, played out on

the film screen of analepsis or past narration, which is marked. Fleischmann considers past

relationships a bit, and Paul details the way in which his first queer sexual encounters

conditioned how he thinks about Eros and libido in the present-tense. But even Plante’s

narrator, writing what is essentially a scrapbook of retrograde memories alongside the

encyclopedia itself, details memories of Vivian almost exclusively in terms of a central thematic:

the narrator’s anointment as Zelda and the ways in which Viv plays a role in her transition, her

becoming. These are not, in any overt sense, “transition novels,” perhaps because the memoir

genre has been one of the few in long-form literature more widely available to trans writers.22

In fact, only Kaveney’s—which, it should be noted, was begun decades before any of the others

here—follows any kind of trajectory through stages of transition. But, crucially, even Tiny

Pieces of Skull picks up from a point in Annabelle’s history when she has fully established name,

pronouns, friends, and romantic relationships very much as a woman. The breasts and wry,

biting confidence are the only elements of any “transition” which seem “acquired” in the

course of the action. As such, there is an almost Victorian flavor to this minor literature, picking

up at a point in their characters’ development which sets a clear stage for the challenges and

triumphs to follow, as opposed to from the cradle to the grave23. Prehistory is foggy and in

22 But then, recalling Frye, perhaps this is due to the trans memoir’s merging with the novel through “insensible gradations.” 23 Peter Brooks writes about this at some length in his piece on Dickens in Reading for the Plot. There’s also something to be said regarding Kafka as the initial referent for minor literature in Deleuze and Guattari. Kafka’s “protagonists,” such as they are, are often already changed at the onset of the action—Samsa in

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many cases demonstrably unnecessary; the protagonists are orphaned by the phobic public

spheres and make memories in communities of re/persistence. Jack Halberstam suggests that

the absence of memory or wisdom leads to new forms of knowing (QF, 54), from which one can

extrapolate: the absence berths new forms of making/expressing/reading. Walking through the

viciousness of East Boston for Alexa in Sketchtasy, or the transphobic queer bars of Tiny Pieces

of Skull for Annabelle, requires a selective forgetting, one which opposes the neoliberal call to

ignore or supersede histories of oppression and resistance. At a more personal level, this

would include deadnaming and the willful erasure of parts or all of a pre-transition past.

Whereas Sycamore’s Alexa moves more-or-less comfortably between the professional

heteronym “Tyler” for sex work clients and her preferred moniker, Platt’s Wendy, Kaveney’s

Annabelle, and Plante’s Zelda have no such interest in modulating. With Jack Sheppard, the old

name is deeply buried and washed away. Imogen Binnie has commented how pleased she was

that no reader has ever asked her about Maria’s deadname, which is perhaps as much a mark

of the recent past as it is the respect of her readership. Plante’s narrator notes that Vivian’s

parents attempted to have her deadnamed and misgendered in her obituary, and, ominously,

threatens to enact her plans to kill anyone from beyond the grave who attempted to do that to

her. In the reality of Little Blue Encyclopedia, the newspaper refuses the parental request, but

the mountain of examples rendering this a near-fantasy (at least in the US) are too depressing

to reference here.

“Metamorphosis,” Josephine the Mouse Singer, K in The Trial, Rossman in Amerika…none of these changes all that much in the course of the action. Grete in “Metamorphosis” may be the counterexample, but her progression is arguably reflective, read only in light of her brother’s becoming a giant insect.

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Jack Halberstam cites Morrison’s Beloved as evidence that forgetting can be used as a

tool of the dominant culture to maintain the fiction of a just or tolerant present (QF, 83), but it,

too, can be deterritorialized. Halberstam notes the ways in which “resistance lurks in the

performance of forgetfulness itself” (QF, 69). Forgetfulness can be “rupture with the eternally

self-generating present” (QF, 70), without necessarily lapsing into the Child’s inexorable and

unachievable futurity. Put another way, minor literature might adopt forgetting as a strategy to

disrupt the regularity of Oedipal transmission (QF, 71), a chain or lineage steeped as much in

heteronormative gender relations as progressivist histories of literature and culture. What is

worth remembering, what needs to be emblematized and solidified into narrative, is very much

in question in this minor literature; the negative space of the past is no more sacred than the

uncertain murk of the future(s). Kai Cheng Thom’s narrator muses, sitting at a clinic awaiting

attention, “We sit together and wait. For the time to pass. For the memories to fade. For the

waiting to be over” (FF, 95). Here are further echoes of the “time that remains,” a will to

forgetting that the subject chooses, rather than having memory wrested away or refigured into

something violent, illicit, or unacceptable. Freeman writes that artists note the insufficiency of

pure nostalgia for the revolutionary moment AND a purely future orientation (TB, xv), and this

is because a “pure” nostalgia would be one wholly separated from context and subject only to

wistful recollection. That is not the tenor of the revolutionary moment suggested by minor

literature. Similarly, a “purely” future orientation will frustrate both Muñoz’s and Edelman’s

designs—there will be both polluted subject positions to be “evolved” out of existence AND the

endlessly forestalled future of the Child. Halberstam, paraphrasing Nietzsche, suggests there is

neither happiness nor present without forgetfulness (QF, 83), a concept that, as with much of

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Nietzsche, can be read as defeatist and counterproductive by the Master, qualities that the

minoritarian subject can champion and embody. Deleuze and Guattari offer a slightly different,

more cryptic take: “Memory brings about a reterritorialization of childhood” (TML, 78).

Perhaps forgetting is the deterritorialization which begins the series. In any case, if the

femmes’ abovementioned debate in Little Fish seriously is taken seriously, childhood is a ripe

territory for reconfiguration in trans minor literature.

Childhoods and Adolescences

Juliana Huxtable, in a Wildean turn, writes of “the aesthete faggots”: “nostalgic sub-

cultures organized around lived dreams of undying youth: tragic androgynes glamorously

avoiding middle-age life or perhaps glamorizing its unavoidability. The responsibility of

adulthood indefinitely suspended in a Dionysian indulgence in which everyone simultaneously

played Lord Henry and Dorian” (MPG, 52). There is little debate that Jack Sheppard lives out a

kind of second adolescence, the first having been stolen by indentured servitude and a name

that was never really his, and, yes, there is a distinct kind of glamor to his romance with Bess

and the spoils of his thefts. Small doses of glamor. Paul/Polly lives out multiple adolescences,

transforming at the beginning of the novel simply out of burning curiosity to experience sex as a

woman. Bran, the finally-transitioning protagonist of Samuel Delaney’s Trouble on Triton

similarly triggers a second pre-adulthood as he decides the extent to which he wants to

transition and the degree to which this will change his attraction to women—an incredible

degree of control, but it is the future, after all. Yet Huxtable’s options above are a bit more

complex, belying something beyond one’s age relating only to when they’ve begun taking

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hormones, getting surgeries, or simply identifying as other than the binaristic sex-gender

they’ve been assigned at birth. Subcultures are themselves an adolescent refuge—those that

are not aged out of tend to become variations on or appendages of majoritarian monoculture.

Here, though, the aesthete androgynes live out undying youth through nostalgia, and, like most

nostalgia, one for a past which may never have really existed. More interesting than

glamorously avoiding middle-age, which, in a foreshortened life-expectancy is nearer to death,

is glamorizing the unavoidability thereof—fatalism. Is Lord Henry a stand-in for bourgeois self-

loathing, or is he an ideal of impossible queer certitude? Is Dorian a nihilist, pursuing the anti-

moral as an ethos, a compulsion, or a curse? Perhaps how one answers this last question is

ultimately whether they think Dorian Gray is the man or the picture; surely there is no penance

to be paid in the eyes of Oscar Wilde? In any case, to be both at once is a seemingly impossible

dynamic; the student become the master become the desperate teenager.

Halberstam notes the ways in which Western cultures normativize the emergence of the

adult from an unruly or dangerous adolescence as the desired pattern of maturation, and

longevity as the highest future. The great “27 club” musicians who die “too young” or the

cultural critic who takes his own life when it seems perhaps childish or out-of-time to do so are

instructive cases in contrast; no one is allowed to wonder if Winehouse or Hendrix would have

made another album, what kinds of personal trauma would make persistence unthinkable for

Cobain or Bourdain, how cognitive, affective, or physical pain made a future impossible for Ian

Curtis, Janis Joplin, or Jim Morrison, or even how SOPHIE or Jeff Buckley ended up in such

precarious positions as to accidently perish. Perhaps these lives are emblematic of post-

modern failure or (“tragic”) dismissal of the high future of longevity. But Halberstam’s concern

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is broader, considering the ways in which the phobic public spheres “pathologize modes of

living that show little or no concern for longevity” (QTP, 4). For Lawlor’s Paul, Thom’s narrator,

Plante’s Zelda, and Sycamore’s Alexa, this pathologization relates directly to higher education,

and the promise of a future that it brings. The Academy is deliverance from an adolescent

present to an adult future, and anything which forestalls or negates that future is pathological.

But neither are any of these characters transgender Holden Caulfields: even Maria Griffiths, the

Kerouac-ian road protagonist of the bunch, has a great deal more self-awareness than the bulk

of the “angry young men” of mid-20th century literature. As mentioned above, this minor

literature does not borrow from Bildungsroman with any particular fervor; you cannot have a

development novel if you are expected not to develop. Freeman writes of Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick’s interest in queer childhood’s protractive, distinctive pastness—a haunting for any

present or future which would attempt to divorce itself. This childhood, irrespective, perhaps,

of chronological age, is “somatically and psychologically estranged from adulthood in

unpredictable ways” (TB, 82).

But there is no monolithic or even consistent experience of teenage or pre-teen years in

this minor literature. Any prescribed pattern would corrupt the variety of paths into the novels,

and would naturally (and entirely erroneously) impart a causation where none exists, or

perhaps none can or should. Alexa spends a number of intervals of Sketchtasy coming to terms

with her sexual abuse at the hands of her father, empathizing with other survivors and drawing

firm boundaries with biological family even as she depends upon their financial support.

Wendy, on the opposite end, has a deeply loving and crucial relationship with her father, Ben,

which seems often like a mutual leaning-in, a modulation of who takes on the role of parent

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and who child—Jonny Appleseed experiences a matriarchal familial structure with similar

intensity and necessity in Joshua Whitehead’s novel of the same name. Thom’s narrator is

somewhere in between, having somewhat of a blank relationship with her parents and their

expectations for her future, but a very close one with her sister. Point being, childhoods

themselves—the chronological period between awareness and liberation from familial

bondage—are various and thus not a decisive feature of this minor literature. Instead,

thematizing second, potentially prolonged adolescence is the distinctive mark. And not only

second, but resistant, prohibited, disappointed/ing adolescences—perhaps not that different

from the first, though Halberstam reminds us even these are highly gendered: where

adolescence is a rite of passage for heteronormative “boys,” it is to be a lesson in restraint for

“girls” (FM, 12). What, then, for those who disidentify with given, or any, categories?

Paul is, of course, the most defiant case of any, perhaps proving that despite the ability

to change his physical appearance in the most radical and immediate ways, what is inside

remains more or less the same. His lengthiest transformation answers the prerequisite of the

longest amative relationship within the novel, his courtship of Diane, begun at Michfest where

the reader is forced to wonder if Paul/Polly is the kind of “imposter” who would’ve been barred

entry from the festival, were he lacking his magical ability. How many Pauls entered that

“hallowed ground”? How many truly wanted to? As Paul prepares to visit Diane, in his first

ostensibly lesbian relationship, he is “entering his last days of boyhood, at least for awhile”

(PMG, 146). It could be a lyrical, tragic, or perverse thought, depending; none of these changes

the bitter and sad ending of the foray, nor Paul’s being relatively unaltered upon reentering this

“boyhood” in a leather bar in Chicago, or anywhere else.

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Wendy does not detail childhood transphobia or dysphoria of any distinct sort: her

difficulty was perhaps more linguistic. As a teen, she “had no words or world that made sense

of her as a girl—so she didn’t think of herself that way” (LF, 287); the need to re-map is

endemic. She wonders if her grandfather may have found himself in a not dissimilar

linguistic/nomenclatural bind, neither encountering that world, nor being granted access to it.

Rapunzelle suggests to the narrator of Fierce Femmes that the latter “lost the chance for [a]

normal life […] before she was born” (FF, 149). It is not a predestination, it’s an anti-

destination; knowing what she cannot have or is denied somehow simplifies the choices moving

forward. The subtext is perhaps she did not desire that life anyway, which is proven by her

“escape” from a committed relationship, months later. But the birth lottery did not fail Thom’s

narrator the way it does many minoritarian subjects: she sought out the big city, resistance

fighting, and a release for her ghost as outgrowths of her gender expression and identity. The

novel is full-to-bursting with the irreal and heroic, but it is never more than a single step of

remove from the very real and tangible imprints of the boot of the state on the neck of the

minoritarian subject.

Maria Griffiths, too, escapes from her homonormative relationship, though more

through atrophy and apathy than leaving without a note. As she plans any kind of next move,

she has “been single for twelve hours and she’s already regressing back to sixteen” (N, 96). But

it is a desired (if not desirable, per se) regression, a falling-back-into that the Master’s time does

not allow or abide. A few weeks later, upon hearing Fugazi24, representing the music of her

24 An interesting, not to say potentially ironic, sort of “adolescent” choice of its own; singer Ian MacKaye’s unwavering punk ethos was (and continues to be) expressed through the policies of his Dischord Records label, his

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adolescence: “She’s sixteen, but she’s the right sex this time” (N, 125). This statement certainly

suggests its obverse: is she the right age? Maria offers one answer to that question slightly

earlier, in a relatively rare note regarding her gender expression’s prehistory: “When she was

little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit around her gender—

responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid” (N, 98). A childhood

spent, at least in part, protecting the adults from the adult you want to become. Blood hardly

exempts the biological family from its phobias, and may in fact intensify them. Maria’s is a

specific perversion of a development narrative—a subject position that is not grown out of, but

rather in to. As Maria puts it: “She didn’t know she was trans, she couldn’t put into words that

she was a little girl, but she did know that something was horribly wrong and she blamed

herself for it” (N, 127). She does not reach this conclusion in isolation, even if it is not directly

enforced upon her, either. But is this the/a absent or unspoken moment, redacted from or

deprioritized out of the other novels? Assuming so may be a trap; this simply isn’t the

backstory these novels (and their hero(ine)s) require! And yet, adolescence and childhood

imply adults, and no hetero/homonormative conception of family exists without adulthood,

mastery, perhaps inherent failure and redemption…

Family/Inheritance

bands’ unwillingness to perform to non-all ages crowds, and limit on the ticket price of any concert. He somewhat improbably moved from the straight-edge (“I don’t smoke/I don’t drink/I don’t fuck/At least I can fucking think”—from “Out of Step—with the World”) evangelist hardcore punk of Minor Threat to the “grown up” complexity and sonic modularity of Fugazi.

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Inheritance is an engine of the most explosive epoch of the novel’s development in

Western literature. Parentage, lineage, class, social mobility, kinship, and marriage serve to

mask (or amplify, depending) colonialism, race, ability, and sexuality throughout the letters of

the long 19th century, and perhaps no less so in much of the 20th. Alternative family structures

abound in minor literature, but it is important to note that such formations remain referential

(if not deferential) to the phobic public sphere of heteronormative family. Fathers are largely

absent or elided, but other mothers, siblings, children, and grandchildren run through the

literature in guises both figurative and tangible. Sara Ahmed proposes the formulation of

heterosexuality as inheritance (QP, 85), which immediately begs another question: is

inheritance necessarily heterosexual/heteronormative/homonormative? This minor literature

assumes not. When inheritance is broken of bloodlines and bio-genealogy, it takes on shapes

and epidemiological patterns that confound and frustrate heteronormative timelines and

scales.

In its trans-sisterliness, the relationship between Annabelle and Natasha in Tiny Pieces

of Skull is “an important connection to possibility” (TPS, 4), a connection which is literally

impossible within nuclear families under one roof. The only possibility there is that of The Child

and what he (never they, and rarely she) might “turn out to be.” Latent (revolutionary)

possibility between minoritarian subjects is generated through familial bonds far thicker than

bloodlines. As important as Bess’s parents were in her radical training, they are forced to

abandon her as a young girl during the fighting, for her own safety. It is with Jack, in

considering the possibility of the Thieftopia, that “together they have revived her vanish’d

family—made them breathe again in the present” (CF, 234). Breathing here means leaving

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London, the parent that no longer can hold them, and Bess’s family, vanish’d by colonizers and

empire, breathes again in she and Jack’s restoration of their radical community in the Fen.

Voth speculates further on the city-as-parent earlier in the text: “the particular relation

between the queer/trans body and the city […] I have so many times felt the city itself was my

mother, and I her asphalt nursling” (CF, 69). Certainly, cities dominate minor literature, as the

heterogeneousness of urban centers allow for niches to be carved out, and nodes between

majoritarian spheres and minoritarian subjects to be established. Alexa works the stroll of The

Block in Boston to find clients, Thom’s narrator finds her enclave of trans femmes amongst the

clubs and sex workers, Annabelle haunts Tenderloin-like neighborhoods in Chicago’s Old Town,

and Jack, Bess, and the gang navigate London’s underworld until they cannot any longer. When

the colonizer turns inward, the gentry displaces the means of minoritarian survival. It might be

a shell game, each next hidden-unless-you’re-really-looking city mother shifting within, until or

unless it’s finally drummed out completely. Jack and Bess do not exactly outgrow the city and

their childhood in/of it, but as they are rendered more visible within it, they reach a tipping

point beyond which there is no return. They are open adversaries with the state and its agents,

and the city at a certain point holds no definite refuge for them.

Trans elder Sally stumps for a heteronormative family that she cannot accept does not

exist for Krys in The Masker. The former is possessed of the notion that Krys’s happiness will

trump any bigotry on the part of her parents, because “at the bottom of their heart, they love

their kids” (M, 60). Perhaps the monolithic singular “heart” is telling here; biological parents

are presented as a unit of acceptance or disavowal, and the threat or guarantee of the latter

overwhelms the effort of pursuing the former. Elizabeth Freeman notes that in the course of

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“exploring the ideology of family intimacy […] as class-marked temporal phenomena within

which less privileged queers stumble” she finds that this ultimately unfollowable ideology is one

“from which they might find new ways of being” (TB, 32). The concept of chosen family is

indeed a queer one, warping as it does the rectilinear geometry of heteronormative family

structure, and in so doing, perverting the sense of familial time which results from it. At the

political level, Lee Edelman sees the logic of the Child as inarguably soliciting our defense,

preserving “the absolute privilege of heteronormativity” by rendering queer resistance

unthinkable (NF, 2). It is one thing for people to pursue heteronormative ends via marginally

distinct means; so long as the ends are the same, these narratives can be woven into a

metanarrative of diversity. But should the ends be discarded, resistance becomes illegible, and

the phobias of the public spheres amplify to a fever pitch.25 Ahmed writes of the family form as

a “social good” (QP, 74); at what point does or can a social good become an individual

bad/harm? The family form straightjackets queer liberation into pressing for representational

goals such as gay marriage as an absolute end, a horizon reached. That social good—access to

the same governmental investment in/obsession with amative coupling which monogamous,

procreative heterosexual have enjoyed since the founding of this country—washes out the

individual who does not share it as a value completely. And this is indeed a temporal

consideration; Halberstam notes that as a “false narrative of continuity,” family gets in the way

of alternative alliances of coalitions (QF, 71). This is to say, if every coalition and relation is

25 This begins to resemble Robert Merton’s mid-century strain theory: to accept the ends but reject the means is innovation—a neoliberal, progressivist concept if ever there was one. But to reject the cultural goals AND the means to achieve them is open rebellion, which must be put down on economic, political, and moral grounds.

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judged as or against family, those which do not share hetero/homonormative family’s goals will

naturally be found wanting.

Jack Sheppard watches his beloved Bess rock on the hobby horse he has stolen, and,

though there is no feeling he experiences at her solicitation that is wholly divorced from the

erotic, he senses “something tender and deprav’d at once. A fatherliness that had nothing to

do with age or familial Relation” (CF, 107, author’s emphasis and capitalization). Indeed not, as

though Bess is chronologically older, she is neither related to Jack nor resembles in any way a

dad. But familial closeness/distance modulates between both of those things throughout this

minor literature. In Little Fish, Wendy’s dad is different “in a good way,” now, implying that he

was different in a worse way, previously. In the same novel, Sophie’s mom was “nicer” in

general when Sophie was younger, but is “nicer about trans stuff” now (LF, 145), creating an

interesting binary-without-a-choice, as progress has here meant being more tolerant to one’s

progeny’s identity, but meaner overall! Halberstam notes the ways in which “passing down”

from mother to daughter is invested in white/gendered/heteronormativity (QF, 127), which is

interesting in that those relationships are almost wholly absent here. Natasha is not

Annabelle’s mother, Alexa’s mother does not view her as a daughter, Wendy’s mother is long

dead, and even the older Fierce Femmes are not really mothers to Thom’s narrator. Instead,

Fierce Femmes observes that Kimya’s smile “felt like sisterhood” (FF, 41), and not exactly an

absent sisterhood, either, as the narrator feels quite close to her biological sister, eventually

even “passing down” her beloved switchblade to her (FF, 187). But Kimya, maternal as she is

throughout the novel, notes her own experience of absence, helping the narrator because “she

never had sisters to help her on her journey, and no one should have to go it alone” (FF, 40-41).

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No one should have to, but Kimya, it seems, did. One wonders if the trans elder Mexica in Tiny

Pieces of Skull had sisters to help her on her journey, and Wendy’s grandfather in Little Fish

certainly did not.

The minoritarian family and its potentialities change geographically, as well as

generationally. Even Felix, the masker himself, telling Krys that she’d “make a good wife” (M,

28) is generational: such a statement implies that Krys would desire such domesticity with

someone from whom she acknowledges the charge of their relationship is sexy games of

domination. Does this statement imply he in any way desires her as a “good wife,” or a wife to

replace his own? It is an ill-fit moment amongst a mélange of ill-fit moments. Not dissimilarly,

Thom’s narrator find herself, improbably and briefly, in a “trans power-couple” with Josh. It is

not long before the reality reveals itself; she has become “stuck in a story that someone else

wrote for me” (FF, 186). This statement is of course literally true, but her consternation is at

becoming entangled in the Master’s story, one that was never written with her in mind. She

has crossed a biographical border to a territory that has space for the more bourgeois Josh, but

not her.

Jack Halberstam locates an alternative narrative structure in Dory’s story in Finding

Nemo. She exists in a state of “disconnection from the family and contingent relations to

friends and improvised relations to community” (QF, 80), which become elements of “a journey

without a telos” (QF, 81). This is a minor literary form, deterritorializing the primacy of familial

relations to those contingent and improvised. It means Anabelle must forge deep (and, indeed,

life-saving) bonds in Tiny Pieces of Skull, and Alexa must be willing to find love and friendship

from those willing to either tolerate or participate in her urban lifestyle in Sketchtasy. Many

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novels concern adventures in escaping the structures of relationality which condition the daily,

but fewer are concerned with challenging its existence, or remolding it in ways which render it

unrecognizable to the public spheres. To deterritorialize the family will inevitably result in a

reterritorializing onto the quotidian and what is perceived and experienced as a constitutive

element of a living day.

Fantasy/Irreality26

When everything takes on specific value in the political register, all fantasy can be

revolutionary. The time of fantasy is thus future time. LH Stallings (2016) worries about a

public sphere that “traffics mostly in nostalgia, discourse, and moral narratives. It remains ill-

equipped to deal with fantasy and the hold of the undercommons” (174). Trafficking in

nostalgia is not as simple as living in the past, it is longing for a future which reproduces the

elements and conditions of that past which most enfranchised the nostalgizer. Moral

narratives are those which enact the Master’s ethical precepts, be they steeped in

jurisprudence, religion, racial hierarchy, or national constitution. But to traffic in discourse

seems the odd man out in this list of concerns. This study has previously referenced an

abolitionist logic which is obsessed with trafficking, especially when it comes to the bodily

autonomy of women and femmes. This logic attempts to recur to the United Nations’ standard

of human trafficking as based on “force, fraud, or coercion,” often even extending this logic to

the rather perverse notion of “self-trafficking,” should one’s comportment and behavior fail to

26 Unless the note about discourse (see below) is heavily expounded upon, this section is ripe to be divvied up into others. It may have more to do with identity than time, on the whole.

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meet the abolitionist limitations on activity. Trafficking in discourse is precisely this logic, the

product of phobic spheres if ever there was one, the same logic that produced the “white

slavery” moral panic of the early 20th century27 and which provides the logic of policing and

controlling queer, trans, Black, Brown, disabled, sex working, and indigenous bodies through to

today. Minor literature works against abolitionist logic and discourse, a revolutionary counter-

discourse to those trafficked by the agents of the Master.28 The trans protagonists of minor

literature rarely, as noted, dream of utopia, and tend not to demand much more than bodily

autonomy and what could be concisely termed “courtesy.” Alexa waits in the free clinic for HIV

testing, a “responsibility” of the queer community which is actively contravened by prohibitions

on the acquisition of prophylactics, needle exchange, and testing itself, and fantasizes about the

clinic as a comfy café (S, 196). Not a world in which HIV does not exist, nor one in which testing

and protection are so freely available as to render the virus an impossible rarity, but simply one

which cares enough about the trauma of constant vulnerability to make testing for the illness

more pleasant. It is a dream of de-medicalization, or at least deindustrialization of medicine;

Alexa is a shaman of controlled substances, the only industrialized elements of her self-

medication the companies who produce the pharmaceutical drugs.

In The Masker, Krys draws a distinction: “The fun of forced femme fantasy, of clothes, of

sexy power games versus the reality of transition” (M, 65). There is a poignant sense that for all

the magic Jack Sheppard experiences through his love of Bess, or the wonder at femme

27 See Gayle Rubin’s “The Trouble with Trafficking,” which sought to clarify concerns that she had collapsed sex work into trafficking in the earlier, more widely-read “The Traffic in Women.” The latter piece played on an Emma Goldman essay of the same name, which put sex work and marriage on a spectrum of sex-gendered services exchanged for survival or remuneration. 28 This could be ripped wide open, thinking through the way in which Elizabeth Bernstein describes “ethnography of discourse” as regarding abolitionist thinking around trafficking.

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closeness felt by Wendy’s chosen family, or between Viv and Zelda, the Lipstick Lacerators, or

even Maria and Piranha, none of it is fantasy. It is the bulwark against a certain real, a levee of

trans communitarian self-protection, a deterritorialization. Fantastic time need not be future

any more than nostalgic time is past, fantasy is instead perhaps the awareness of

reterritorialization of time—ways in which chrononormativity can be feinted and subverted,

chronovented and chronolocuted, simply by directly questioning why it is assumed. The better

world emerges from the lapsing of the worse, only then can the latter be superseded, obviated,

outmoded, and fantasy is as much the lapse as the supersession.

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Chapter 5

Identity/Passing

Perhaps the strictest distinction between memoir and fiction is the former’s generic

responsibility to detail and explain one’s existence. Louis A. Renza (1977) offers a classificatory

attempt which reveals the muddiness of this responsibility, however, and opens onto the hand-

wringing world of autobiography theory. For him, a fictional text “is trained on its own present;

it posits a total world composed of setting, characters, and action, the definitive representation

of which is kept in narrative abeyance like some still, unravished bride of imagination” (5). The

deeply heteronormative view of fiction or imagination’s agency should not pass unnoticed

here; Renza takes “definitive representation” to be a prize for the bridegroom in some kind of

forestalled consummation of the narrative act. He further suggests that the fictional text

invites the reader to supplement, but is this so different from what autobiography does with

“its own present”? Perhaps it comes down to a matter of time, the pastness of memoir being

so endemic to the form. By contrast, “the autobiographer […] cannot assume (as can a writer

of traditional or self-conscious fiction)”—and this may be the hinge, “traditional” being code for

majoritarian—“that she can elide the gap between herself as she writes the discursive ‘I’

passing seriatim through any sustained piece of writing” (ibid, 7). There is something about the

use of the first-person, directly or indirectly, that motivates this distinction for Renza. Elision is

one of the Master’s tools in adjudicating the minoritarian subject and their (il)legibility, and it is

not coincidental that the first-person is nearly absent from this minor literary fiction. When it is

deployed, it is either in the most irreal texts (Fierce Femmes or the footnote narrator of

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Confessions of the Fox) or the most experimental/autobiographical (Mucus in My Pineal Gland

and Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through). In both instances, the “seriatim” nature of this

pronominal use can be challenged; serial time is linear time, a construction highly troubled by

minor literature. But the fiction of minor literature does not collapse the distinction, either.

Renza notes three different types of autobiography, and whether one accepts the

taxonomy wholesale, it operates fairly consistently through autobiography theory. First, there

is memoir, which he suggests suppresses the evocation of pastness, using language to

“declassify life” for its subject/writer. This persistent category relies heavily on preestablished

verbal conventions to neutralize the pressure of a private past. These conventions could be

minoritarian, reflecting some of those sketched in this study, but more likely they activate cues

for identity and time which rely on the shorthands of majoritarian normativities. The second

type of autobiography is confessional, in which the subject “no longer fully entrusts his life to

the present” (“The Veto of the Imagination,” 10). The entrusting of life in minor literature is to

the community, a sharing of narrative predicated on implicating the reader without any

necessary personalized confession. This leaves the third type, the narcissistic, whose motive

does not seem entirely distinct from the other two, save perhaps its inflection as a means of

preserving a life “for posterity.” Minor literature is posited on a communitarian persistence

which harbors no guarantee of individual longevity—it would be a very transient narcissism.

Somewhat surprisingly, Renza has a provision for just such communitarianism in

autobiography. He suggests that the “spirit of anarchism”—which is perhaps no more than a

spirit of individuality/individualism inherent in narcissistic autobiography—that haunts the

autobiographical act is mitigated in cases where the writer blends the “exclusive sense of self”

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into “an exclusive, though collective, ‘minority’ persona” (ibid, 13). Renza has in mind famous

Black American autobiographies which are resistance-informed language acts, extending this

highly individual form into a communitarian “persona” in contradistinction to oppressive

majoritarian culture and society. For the purposes of this study, though, the way in which

minor literature invites and implicates its readership is more interesting than any projected

persona of the author. Renza notes that fictive writing projects its “materials” via a

conterminous reader, while autobiography cannot depend on “others” of discourse to

substantiate self-references. There is a different epistemological standard at work in this

distinction, one which Renza claims renders autobiography a project structured on the reader’s

absence. Minor literature, by contrast, requires a certain presence of its reader, whatever their

subject position, and it is not as simple as identification. Tracking what minor literature does

with time, identity, and labor, time and again the reader, and, reflexively, the writer, are

implicated in a variety of ways.

Georg Misch offers one manner of considering the writer’s relationship to the material

in autobiography when he suggests that “the subject inquiring is also the object inquired into”

(cited in di Summa-Knoop, 2017, 8). This is a fairly prima facie definition, though perhaps

somewhat complicated by the potential dispute over minoritarian subject/object designations.

The Master’s discourse does not so much objectify as subject-ify, and autobiography allows for

engagement with self-objectification in a manner which is less amenable to minor literary

revolutionary potential. The object of autobiography is an extant map, and the relaying of

narrative (or “truth”) is charting a path through that map, not remaking it or even carving out

territory in the way that the novels of minor literature can. The truth-telling “pact” of

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autobiography is needlessly binding—author (subject) is tethered to the narrative (object),

reader is shackled to identification. Laura di Summa-Knoop notes as much in her

characterization of memoir as “highly democratic,” “relatable,” and “our stories” (6, author’s

emphasis). Perhaps the Grand Tradition, majoritarian fiction attempts something much the

same; even (or especially?) historical novels which attempt a dramaturgical level of textbook

“accuracy” hail the broadest “us” to empathize and identify. But di Summa-Knoop has an even

higher standard of narrative cohesion and certainty for “traditional” memoir: “events in a life

should be weaved together in a narrative structure involving relevant causal connections and a

sense of closure […] it is the ability to narrate a life according to such a structure that allows for

a better disclosure of identity” (“Critical Autobiography,” 6). This formulation presumes a lot,

most prominently that the goal of memoir is the “best” disclosure of identity. But then, there is

a name on the dust jacket which corresponds exactly to the first-person “I” within, so if

disclosure—whatever the exact motivation—is not the aim, then the choice of the form is

rendered a mystery. Furthermore, that the causal linearity of events in a life is the clearest way

to achieve this disclosure is also difficult to argue, and, as demonstrated by a phenomenology

of minoritarian time, will be a decisive distinction from minor literature. However, di Summa-

Knoop’s aim in this characterization is one of distinction. Unlike traditional memoir, she

suggests, “critical autobiography” (such as Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts) can “flit with the

boundary” (ibid, 7) between fiction and nonfiction, while confession and the “confessional

pact” have “lost their allure.” But while flitting with the boundary is perhaps a minoritarian

gesture, the foundation of memoir remains, and di Summa-Knoop acknowledges that the vast

majority of autobiographies maintain their contract with authenticity and purported truth. The

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“critical autobiography” is distinguished only be reorganizing its parts, experimenting with form

but remaining bound to genre.

Trans memoir specifically concerns both “doing” and “being” trans, and while relatively

recent examples such as those penned by Juliet Jacques or Janet Mock would sit in comfortable

proximity to the novels in this study, the differences would be more glaring than any

similarities. In thematizing and troubling novelistic conceptions of time, the minor literature

under consideration deterritorializes duration, (re)making the time of the novel into a slice

which deprioritizes both origin and telos, leaving the reader to their own conclusions and

assumptions regarding what happens “before and after” the plot. This study maintains that

part of the revolutionary charge of this fiction is in its refusal to pay down a cycle of climax and

denouement, suggesting not only that monumental change does not occur according to a

linear, causal, regular sequence, but that change itself is not always so easily denoted and

demarcated.

If transgender literature were ever to join a majoritarian canon, it would be by dint of a

copse of “landmark” novels which “definitively” detailed The Trans Experience. Each of these

novels frustrates that ambition, disidentifying with the demand of disclosure and completeness,

in ways that most memoir does not. As such, minor literature considers identity in ways which

confound expectation while not selling short some of the rather predictable frictions with—

actively or passively—oppressive phobic public spheres. Putting aside the responsibility of the

archetype, in which one reads trans novels to “understand” trans people doing trans things in

trans ways, minor literature might be expected to define and delineate identity purely

negatively. That is, trans means “not cis,” and thus identity is understood as inverse

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comparison to the Master’s dictates on how subjects are to be. Minor literature does indeed

gain some of its teeth through negative comparison and definition, and this body of work is not

different. But this force can feel centrifugal, pressing outward against the outer limits of form

beyond which identity-formation cannot progress. What if instead a minor literature

thematized the centripetal, finding resistance and community solidarity in moments of escaping

the cycle of definition and reification in which the Master uses sex-gender as an identity

bludgeon?

Each of the vestiges of identity examined below carries with it a negative companion, a

resultant cycle, and literary expression which de/reterritorializes it with results capricious or

solemn, but never permanently formative, immutable edifices of something called “character”

or even “personhood.” Becoming’s twin is remaining, rejecting the Master’s endless cajoling

and coercion to progress. The opposite of passing is more complex: does to not pass mean to

fail? Or to be read as something defined by the observer, the Master, or even oneself—and is

that something the preferred identity, or the polluted one? Does failure to pass mean “not

good enough” or “too good?” Authenticity could have a few obverses as well: ersatz, fake,

confederate, cheap, secondhand. The sheer variety of dis-authenticities makes it a deep vein of

opportunity for disidentification and deterritorialization. Masking is perhaps a particular

braiding of unbecoming, intentional failure to pass, and dis-authenticity: it is its own curved

surface out of which a set of centripetal forces emanates. Lastly, the role of recognition, and its

negative partner, misrecognition in the dialectic of external-internal identity construction. One

cannot be recognized without the proportionate possibility of being misrecognized, otherwise it

is not recognition at all, is it simply…cognition.

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The fact that these terms of identity tend to the gerundial should not be lost, either.

Identity here is presented as (dis)continuous in much the same way as it is (dis)identificatory.

The implied negation in each of these has a (frustrated, deformed) chronological component as

well—before becoming, becoming, and become/became, for instance—of which the third, the

future-which-implies-a-past need never be reached. Or, as the Master might prefer, never be

achieved.

Becoming

Minor literature operates under no special responsibility to classify its minoritarian

subjects as minority. Though there are distinct ways—formally and thematically—in which

minor literature is a resistance project, it need not thematize what makes its subjects,

characters, and creators minor. As such, this trans minor literature does not generally directly

thematize transition (with a couple of notable exceptions). But it does thematize becoming:

having become, became, will become, none of which are simply equivalences for transitioning

(of any variety). Novels track change, their engine is development, their verisimilitude is in no

small part dependent on being convincing regarding the changes their characters and

environments undergo. To thematize becoming means to present the body, and, wanting for a

better metaphysical superlative, perhaps the soul, as imperfectible perfectibility: not

specifically becoming-woman, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it1, but becoming-becoming.

1 Becoming-woman is the first in a series of becomings for Deleuze and Guattari (“becoming woman, more than any other becoming, possesses a special introductory power” (TP, 248).). Claire Colebrook notes that this becoming is not so much about the ontological conception of woman as it is “a privileged becoming in so far as she short-circuits the self-evident identity of man” (Understanding Deleuze, (2000), 12). Patty Sotirin calls becoming-woman a way “to deterritorialize the binary organization of sexuality” (Giles Deleuze: Key Concepts (2005), 121) en route to “the production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings” (TP, 278).

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Read this against Paul B Preciado’s note: “in the case of becoming-trans […] either it’s a matter

of following a predictable sex-change protocol […] or else, on the contrary, it’s a question of

instituting an array of practices to reverse the forces of domination over bodies, practices

capable of giving rise to the invention of a new form of life” (AU, 102). In allowing (forcing?)

these novels to speak for themselves, minor literature reinforces aesthetic objects as “arrays of

practices,” and deterritorialization as more than self-protection or isolationism, but indeed

capable of giving rise to invention. Preciado desires this new life be “a radical and joyful form

of political critique,” which “says goodbye to violence, and opens a space for a new

relationality” (ibid). Becoming-trans shall renounce anatomy as destiny, history as prescriptive,

and the laws of body/blood/soil, and, most relevant here, it shall “cross out the map” and

“propose other maps.” These are not political novels, and these are all political novels, and so

minor literature sees them propose “fictions that might allow us to fabricate practices of

liberty” (AU, 103).

In a certain sense, this is where Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl most challenges

what is implicit in trans minor literature: Paul/Polly is not only limitless becoming, but—unlike

any other entity not so supernaturally endowed—limitless became2. Paul, in his ability to

nearly instantaneously alter his sex-gender characteristics, occupies the category of always

(potentially) becoming. Each transformation (because it is simply too quick to be labeled

transition) deforms, promotes, and fucks passing, masking, authenticity, and becoming. And

2 In one sense, Paul is in fact strictly “limitless became.” His presentation of any gender expression is limited only by his own imagination, and thus is something other than selfrepresentation, which is so conditioned by concealing, revealing, and (re)making according to an intersection of outward- and inward-focused strictures. Paul’s experiments and attempts are inevitably met with “success” insofar as he is able to guess at the desires of others, then it just comes down to everything other than looks. Sometimes, perhaps most times, little else is required to complete the experiment.

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yet the moments of most interest are perhaps those that either require or result in other forms

of becoming, beyond “convincingly” altering markers of erotic attraction. Paul notes that

making himself attractive to anyone is one of his “virtues and one of his skills” (PMG, 36,

author’s emphasis). Each of these honorifics is open to question: Paul’s changes ultimately

frustrate many of those closest to him, and making oneself attractive just becomes a matter of

selecting the correct characteristics—this is not trans becoming. Paul does in some respects

attempt to test the limits of his becoming, but generally he finds that there are none, and,

furthermore, that his boundless becoming does not de facto make him happy. Rather than

setting the reader up for any grand explanation, Andrea Lawlor deploys a rather oblique

parable vignette on the perforation of Paul and Polly. Seemingly separated from his sister,

Polly, Paul becomes “both son and daughter” to their parents (PMG, 55), a narrative that makes

his becomings a kind of reassembly of the two sides of himself. If there is a common

denominator to the becomings, it is to be read a certain way, to exercise the virtue not of

feeling more attractive, but genuinely being more attractive to another. As later expanded

upon, passing is almost wholly moot for Paul, everything is bound up in the immediate

becoming, in a way that no other novel here can—or wants or needs—muster.3

So what of these other becomings, the ones that are not strictly resultant from Paul’s

ability to instantaneously alter sex-gender characteristics? Paul muses on going vegetarian for

his first queer femme relationship: “He could change for love. There was a right answer. There

was a scripted next line, and he could get it right. He was superheroic.” (PMG, 159). These four

3 This is all to further press the designation of Paul as presenting a minoritarian subject. Queer? Very. Trans? Maybe. Minoritarian? Some of the key elements of becoming are reterritorialized in ways which troubles the designation.

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ideas are not as automatically linked as Paul’s ever-frenetic thought process suggests. Changing

for love in minor literature is neither so certain nor so self-abnegating as majoritarian romances

might have us believe. The epic love is often a struggle with the self, attempting to discern how

best to become in order to comport oneself to a phobic world that isn’t likely to become much

less so anytime soon. The right answer would imply a clear question—does Paul look for the

answer of how to make Diane love him more/better/longer? Who is asking this question, who

is commanding this narrative? And if there is a scripted line, he needn’t concern himself with

“getting it right,” beyond simply delivering a good reading, and would the script include

summoning his superhero powers? Perhaps this is a way of positing the query of becoming:

which superhero powers are needed to divine who and how to become? The Master’s answers

are available, in theory, and the minor communitarian questions—why do we aspire to the

acceptance of those who would sooner erase us? Can we become something acceptable, and

what do we lose in so becoming?—loom imminent. But Paul has no community until the very

end, when he discovers another who shares his power. Paul’s transformations are all riffs on

homo/heteronormative desire.

After he and Diane break up, Paul “couldn’t muster the energy or focus to become a

more attractive version of himself” (PMG, 209). The reason? Because no one is “cute.” The

locus of becoming is the attractiveness of the other. When Paul does find a version of

community, after fleeing the wreckage of his breakup, it is in a troupe of drag performers,

including the sagacious Ruffles. Paul buries himself in study, comes across Samuel Delaney’s

memoirs, and is struck with the revelation of his lack commitment to becoming. He reads of

Delaney’s famous image of masses of men, writhing and fucking in bathhouses or subway

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restrooms, the nascent science fiction author diving in with gusto, to which Paul compares his

observing an ACT-UP die-in and running away from the scene (PMG, 298). It is a queer analogy

in multiple senses: Delaney, a married gay man in the Big City finding and being inspired by an

erotic home, and Paul, a young queer person in the same City some years later, afraid of the

“realness” of AIDS activism. Whatever strength Paul finds in his failure (or refusal) to

permanently “have become” is revealed in an exchange with Ruffles, who muses that the

studious Paul is “a changed man,” to which Paul rejoins, “I’m not a man.” (ibid). There is no

further, indelicate query regarding what Paul then is; “not a man,” the dismissal of cis being, is

sufficient in its call to becoming.

But Paul is a specific kind of fabulist scientist, moored in his becomings solely by

whatever might be described as his “character” at some level of depth beyond what can be

seen at the surface. The other (anti-)models to follow build up a highly intricate set of

reflections on minoritarian becoming which serve as the foundation upon which identity

formation (or its converse) is built in this minor literature.4 To this end: a comparison between

the becomings of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl with a more abrupt5 set of ruminations

on becoming in Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars. Thom’s narrator does not need to begin

with what she is not, instead proceeding from what she will be: “I’m going to become a woman.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable as a boy” (FF, 13). This is reason enough; discomfort

overwhelms any resistance to become. And yet, the path is not necessarily any clearer in light

of a destination that may be: “Sometimes, to become somebody else, you have to become

4 This is the pitch: models of becoming which contour the shape of this minor literature and its various deterritorializations of the Western novelistic form. 5 Deleuze and Guattari would say “fast.”

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nobody first” (FF, 21), which for the narrator means “I’m going to find the place where my

shadow ends and my body begins” (FF, 22). This is no idle metaphor; the place to become

nobody very much exists—it is where the Master’s “somebody” loses some of its ubiquity.

“Nobody” both denudes the primacy of the body and melts into a community of those bodies

who have seceded from the quest to somebody-hood. The shadow can be read here as both

the negation of the body and the darkened trail of the past. The only characteristic from her

childhood carried forward by the narrator is her ability to fight. She notes that her father

“thought [fighting] would make me a man. It didn’t work out for him” (FF, 29). Of course it

didn’t, it was never his becoming. No matter how much he wanted the narrator to “be

somebody” as a “man,” she was meant to become nobody before anything else.

The narrator is faced with the morphological characteristics of sex-gender which

reinforce (at least elements of) her becoming. She meets with the rather lascivious Dr.

Crocodile, who asks the ineffable-yet-unavoidable: “So tell me about why you want to become

a woman?” (FF, 57). But this is the wrong becoming: “Well, I already am a woman. I just want,

you know, breasts.” Regardless of his conception of their primacy in gender affirmation, Dr.

Crocodile certainly does know breasts, and decides the narrator will “make a very beautiful

woman” as “Asians” are the “best” treatment subjects (FF, 59). Aside from this sadly perhaps

not so unusual orientalization of transition, Crocodile sees being a very beautiful woman as the

object of becoming, again ignoring the narrator’s proclamation that she is already a woman.

This is a decisive element in minor literary identity formation: friction between

endorsed/accepted modes of becoming and those concerned with minoritarian self-

representation/preservation. One could formulate that the narrator seeks to become

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something she already is. In this instance, she cannot help but note, in looking in a mirror, that

“I see, for the first time, a pretty girl. Or a girl who will be pretty” (FF, 61-62). The former may

have something to do with her surgery, but the latter almost certainly regards the company she

now keeps, new models for becoming or unbecoming to which to compare her own sense of

self and revolutionary potential. She will be pretty because she has a more acute, boditarian,

communitarian sense of pretty in the chosen family of the fierce femmes.

These models include the well-tested love of Kimya and Rapunzelle, two femmes with

nearly opposite t4t praxes, unified only by the fierceness of their communitarian love. As they

battle over the ways in which the political has become personal, Kimya notes how she “holds

on” to Rapunzelle while the latter seems to continuously change as she becomes a more violent

resistance fighter: “because you’re worth holding on to” (FF, 49, author’s emphases). Is Kimya

holding onto their original love, or some fundament or hub of her lover’s person that does not

change in the chaos around it? Or is it the constant becoming itself that constitutes some part

of this worth? The former drag queen Duchess Gloriana Cochrain aka Darren becomes Valaria

after her boyfriend is murdered: “she vowed to herself that no one would ever hurt her again,”

(FF, 95), which means shaving her head and burning all her wigs. Becomings emanate from

trauma, from loss, from fear of loss, and from affirmation. As the narrator nears the end of her

time with the fierce femmes, soon to test the waters of heteronormative domesticity, she

notes, in a poem “my hair / takes hold, grows longer […] is dreaming and becoming, becoming

and dreaming, dreaming & becoming & becoming & becoming” (FF, 144-147). Her hair

represents a dialectical exchange between imagination and panoramic horizon, and moving

towards or away from these hirsute dreams. Becoming requires dreaming because it is not a

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linear process, a teleological march which measures change only against the degree to which it

advances or impedes progress towards the telos. Dreaming requires becoming because it is

otherwise static, an imagined/ary canvas on a wall, designed for observation and

contemplation only. It is thus wholly unsurprising that no version of the narrator’s relationship

with Josh will satisfy the cycle of dreaming and becoming—it is instead dreamt and became.

From the first date, the narrator wonders: “Where’s my weirdo punk transgender novel life

gone?” (FF, 167). The answer is that the novel is nearly over, and this change will be a comma

before a final set of ellipses. As she’s leaving him, a scant ten pages later, she defines her

course of action: “I’m flying away to see if I know who I am, what I might still become” (FF,

186), each qualification of which is critical to the minor literary project of becoming. The

conditional “see if I,” leaves the question very much open as to if she can, does, or ever did

know who she is/was; the uncertainty of “might;” the potentiality of “still;” the above-noted

cyclicality of “become.”

Nevada, another novel almost entirely shot through with its protagonist’s subject

position, offers a different set of models for becoming. Maria Griffiths, as has been noted,

thinks a great deal about being (and doing) trans, but posits questions of becoming in fairly

concrete terms. The central conceit is framed clearly, late in the novel, after the inputs of

Maria’s experience with the possibly-trans James: “how do you transition but then continue to

evolve as a person, post-transition, when it seems like the only way you got through your

transition was to assert loudly, even just to yourself, that you know who you were and you

knew what you wanted and you trusted yourself?” (N, 223). Based on some of the identitarian

conditions and responses thus far noted, a range of answers emerge to this almost certainly

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rhetorical question. One: there is no requisite evolving as a person, and so “continuing” to do

so should not be assumed, nor automatically valued. Two: post-transition is as chimerical as

transition itself, though Maria should be given the semantic benefit of the doubt. She likely

means something closer to “having decided to transition.” Three: the “seems like” is critical

here; this question seems like it more regards how one gets/got through their transition than

any kind of evolution. Finally: why is knowing who you are and what you want obstructive to

continuing to evolve? Perhaps the answer to this point is self-evident if knowing who one is

and what one wants could be antithetical to evolution—it is instead the result of evolution. In

the terms of minor literature, evolving is simply not a one-to-one equivalence with becoming.

The Master’s pressure to not only “evolve” but “continue to evolve” asserts itself not despite

but as a result of knowing (or seeming to know) oneself.

Imogen Binnie includes an odd (and, though singular, possibly intentional?) pronominal

slip as Maria looks back on the decision to come out: “Coming out as trans was the first change

she ever made to my own life that felt like it was leaving the map that was laid out for her at

birth” (N, 75, my emphasis). Coming out as trans, transitioning, being trans, and thinking about

getting better at being trans are all presented as mile markers of sorts, but the extent to which

Maria has “succeeded” at each of these is largely positioned in contradistinction to those

around her. It may be that “she” and “her” become “my” in transition only through “leaving

the map,” which is of course the Master’s map, the one that runs through familial and societal

inheritance, and terminates at phobic normativities that totally obviously (by the time the

narrative of Nevada takes up with her, anyway) have no space for Maria Griffiths. Though

there are a series of slippages and certain-uncertainties in how Maria shapes her trans

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(anti)epistemology, she hold to the certainty and inexorability of trans becoming: “You just are

trans […] you can’t will it away” (N, 195). Be that as it may, the friction between desire and

being is equally palpable, as Maria avers, “Nobody really want to be a trans woman” (N, 194).

How does minor literature regard minoritarian subjects who disavow the desire to occupy their

subject positions? Paired with the previous note, does not really wanting to be a trans woman

read akin to “nobody really want to be a Black woman in America in the 1950s” or “nobody

wants to be Dälit in India”? The point may be that minor literature need not—though it

might!—lionize or champion the minoritarian subject position, at least as it stands in the view

of the majority. Maria goes on to offer a further caveat: “but the world has moved on from the

narrative that says being trans is something to be avoided at all costs” (N, 195). This addendum

notes the reterritorialization (without the kind of deterritorialization offered by minor

literature) of the phobic public sphere: do try to avoid being trans, but if you have to be… The

ellipsis is filled, one way or the other. The phobic public spheres demand that (most) trans folks

become hidden, silent, or, failing those, pass according to dictates of the majoritarian binary.

Minor literature has a wider range of possibilities: become hidden, but find community and

revolutionary potential whenever possible or necessary, become silent by abstaining from a

debate about your existence, or self-determine in manners both explosively (or scandalously)

overt or assuredly clandestine.

Removed from the above possibilities, some of Nevada’s notes on trans becoming seem

unnecessary. For example: Maria “doesn’t hate […] trans women who have just figured out

that they are going to need to transition but don’t know what to do about it, so they’re super

nervous but also kind of relieved” (N, 23). Why would she hate these women? Because they as

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yet have not “taken the plunge” in becoming? Or is their relief worthy of her potential hatred?

Of course, this statement is about Maria “not” hating these, or perhaps any, trans women,

including those whose becoming does not (as yet) mirror her own. On the other side of the

looking glass, “James knows that transitioning isn’t just, like, you put on a dress and go to work”

(N, 197). How James knows about the insufficiencies of becoming is questionable:

pseudoscientific or pornographic internet research (this is where he stumbles onto the ugliness

of J Michael Bailey and “autogynephilia”(N, 168)), and perhaps some secondhand feminist

inputs from his partner’s interests and commitments (Nicole is initially attracted to James

during her feminist awakening because he is willing to listen to her “without trying to shut her

up” (N, 148).

But these notes are anti-becomings, or what/how not to become. Maria is both being

and doing trans, and the question of the novel is in some ways what to become or do next,

always next. On that matter, the protagonist offers a couple of pointed suggestions. First,

Maria Griffiths, autodidactic expert on trans womanhood, rather desperately notes: “I can’t

figure out a model for my life, my body, anything” (N, 73). This desperation is entirely of

minoritarian subjecthood, but perhaps not in the ways most initially apparent. Exceptionalism

is real, and even in Leslie Feinberg’s corrective history, the point in part is that there are and

always have been transgender warriors. Maria does not state that models do not exist, but

rather that she cannot figure them out. Minor literature deterritorializes the very concept of a

model for life, and writes necessarily incomplete histories of becoming, without inscribing them

as models for anything fixed. Maria’s trans becoming is perhaps in spite of models, not because

of them. Thus, when she offers the seeming modus operandi of the novel, it is in the context of

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model-less-ness: Maria “needs to be extremely irresponsible in her life from now on” (N, 95)—

abnegating responsibility to capitalist terms of “self-sufficiency,” hetero/homonormative

amative coupling, and even friendship recoded as codependency. This last one is the most

striking becoming for Maria: her relationship with James operates from a position of direct and

unsolicited mentorship, left ultimately unresolved as latent potential rather than having

become.

While Maria’s becomings are modulated almost strictly through her own experiences in

Nevada, Wendy’s position vis-à-vis becoming throughout Little Fish is variated through a few

different lenses: her family’s (mis)recognition of her sex-gender transition, her community of

trans women, and her sex work. The novel offers relatively little of its protagonist’s own,

internalized sense of becoming, perhaps because, as with most of this minor literature, it is not

particularly a “transition novel.” Wendy’s encounters with her own becoming are often

modulated by her speculating on her grandfather’s potentially outwardly repressed trans

longing. She observes a photo of her “Opa” in the same grey men’s shirt he seemed always to

wear in her memories, and Wendy wonders if it is part of his hiding his desire for femininity:

“your brain gets numb to how it looks or feels” (LF, 24) to wear the clothes that are expected of

you. This opens onto a seemingly decisive distinction between how Wendy and Maria Griffiths

consider trans becoming, as the former “hated analyzing the whys of trans girls […] the

bottomless hole of egg mode […] all that lost energy” (ibid). This could be termed the “burden

of minoritarian (self-)analysis”: the minoritarian subject is expected to be the greatest theorist

of their own selfrepresentation and subjecthood. Maria, Wendy, and the other protagonists in

this literature fight this burden on multiple fronts, largely through the expectations and

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assumptions of those around them, as conditioned by the phobic public spheres. Wendy

speculates on a skin ailment which is likely the result of bootleg hormones, reading her body as

revolting against the measures she has taken to condition it to her own desire: “Maybe she

wanted too much. It wasn’t enough to transition, to get bottom surgery; she had to have this

too” (LF, 202). But what “this” is, exactly, is not made clear. Hormones, for Wendy, are a

matter of maintenance and a certain kind of affirmation—she seeks only to maintain her

becoming and affirm a subject position which she (and her chosen family of femmes) are

remarkably adept at maintaining. She was not particularly careless in obtaining the hormones,

she has simply reacted to the obstacles of acquiring gender-affirming necessities, or at least the

supplements to her own transition that she sees as necessary. The fact that her AFAB6 or cis

counterparts do not face the same obstacles is left wholly to the reader’s consideration.

Wendy’s becoming seems to inhere such questions: what is “too much” to want?7

This moment of questioning can be counterposed with one of the most pronounced

becomings in this entire body of minor literature, one which draws into sharp relief many of the

questions above. In the course of her returning to sex work, with the key distinction of having

had bottom surgery, Wendy encounters a client who is sufficiently deeply disappointed by her

no longer possessing a bio-penis that a discussion of his potential egg status8 is all but

unavoidable. This ex-military client displays and describes his internalized homophobia, but

seems oblivious to the possibility of his own trans-woman-ness. After a few choice exchanges

6 Assigned Female At Birth, a not noncontentious (self-) label for trans men and nonbinary folks. 7 The Master’s answers to this would be myriad, and definitive. Know your place: status, race, gender, sexuality, locale, beliefs, history—you can want “too much,” but you need at some point to understand you can’t have it. If literature suggests otherwise, then it is literally fantastic. 8 That is, a transgender person who has yet to recognize their trans-ness. See Grace Lavery “Egg Theory’s Early Style” TSQ (2020) 7 (3) 383-398.

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with Wendy, the client seems to comprehend the likeliness that he is in fact a trans woman.

The swiftness of the client’s becoming is remarkable, and an elegant portrayal of the potential

speed of de/reterritorialization without needless psychologizing. The client moves rapidly past

wondering when Wendy “knew” (LF, 218), a question perhaps legible only from the perspective

of one who want to measure his own “knowing” against hers. But Wendy does not need to

answer directly, instead prescribing what the client must hear: “you’re probably a girl, and

that’s probably what you need to do” (ibid). The charges of this becoming, within the context

of the fantasy narrative-building of sex work, are detonated, and by the end of this experience,

the client is Kaitlyn (LF, 225), at least for, but entirely likely to advance far beyond, this night.

Despite its quickness and profundity, each of the becomings in Little Fish feels marked

by what it elides—embodiment, presentation, outward performance. Even if no works of

minor literature are concerned with “becoming minor” per se, some are about the shape and

literal form of the minoritarian subject. Unlike most of the novels at hand, Jack becomes Jack in

the course of the narrative of Confessions of the Fox, and not just that, Jack becomes Jack

through Bess. When he offers her this name—Jack Sheppard—he is “saying himself into being”

(CF, 43, author’s emphases), and upon this naming, he accepts another title: thief. No less than

the first rebirth as the object of Bess’s desire, this second baptism prompts the unknown

narrator to note: “something new was taking shape. Some one new. […] He was entering

history” (CF, 44, author’s emphasis). This triangle of minoritarian becoming is not specific to

the conceit of the novel, that Voth is reading an early and heretofore unknown trans history.

The “thing” taking shape is a new subject position, the “one” taking place is Jack Sheppard,

master thief and lover of Bess, and the “history” is the counternarrative to the Master’s history

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of state violence, power over, and elision. Bess’s desire for Jack includes a vision of this

becoming as a more overt counternarrative to the Master’s history than does Jack; again, she is

the political heart of the Sheppard plot. She suggests Jack should be more than a thief: “King of

the Screwsman,” and in so doing, “she planted a seed. And she meant to let it grow” (CF, 46,

author’s emphasis). This passivity might be unacceptable in a major literary arc: Bess would

fertilize, or water, or even protect the seedling, fostering it into whatever result of a growth

narrative was required. Here, she will permit its growth, in no way prescribing or conscribing

what Jack might become. Her love is a kind of permission, even as her political ethos eventually

renders dissent or ignorance impossible. Jack’s response is varied; he is growing, after all, even

if not in the Master’s unilateral sense. His desire in becoming is clear, he “wanted to have a

Body” in Bess’s presence (CF, 50), and this is in a certain sense the engine of the novel. Minor

literature deterritorializes narratives of growth and reterritorializes them as narratives of

becoming. Jack is Bess’s becoming as much as his own, or perhaps ownership is rendered

vacant as a metaphor for becoming altogether. Becoming is not automatically individual, has

not necessary causation, and does not effect a change which is de facto progressive. Here,

again, minor literature departs from well-worn paths of Bildungsroman, autobiography, and

perhaps The Novel in general.

The stakes here for minor literature are clear, as Deleuze and Guattari make their

commitment plain—“All becoming is minoritarian” (TP, 105)—but what is less plain is the range

of antecedents for this becoming. Is becoming-minor a redundancy, or perhaps a singularity?

The becomings cited above have far less to do with sex-gender, and far more with minoritarian

identity formation and selfrepresentation writ large. Jack Halberstam cites Eva Hayward’s

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query, “what is the somatic sociality of trans-becoming?” as a distinct improvement over the

question “what is a woman?” (T*, 127), and each iteration of becoming is indeed one rooted in

the personal-as-social. Becoming in The Masker is largely a matter of how Krys wants to “do

trans,” up to and including her submissive relationship to Felix. She notes that Felix seeing her

“as a woman” and slapping her, “had been the most feminizing thing that had ever happened

to me” (M, 53). This is neither a value judgment nor a broader comment on womanhood, but

more a realization regarding the form that an outside “feminizing” force could take. It is not

just the violence of the slap (though consent and the concept of submission as play are themes

throughout the novel), but the becoming seen that is feminizing. This becoming has a clear

exterior cause, whereas Krys later notes, regarding her own, interior becoming: “I came out

because I needed something somehow in my life to change” (M, 64). Comings out are rarely

centerstage in these novels, and to claim coming out as trans as the central becoming of this

minor literature would simply be erroneous. Even Jack Sheppard’s becoming—erotic, earth-

splitting, wholly formative—cannot be read directly as coming out as trans, as Bess knows him

as nothing but what he is. There is no necessary prehistory in their relationship, and in fact her

own backstory with the Fen Tigers has more prominence in their story together than his being

sold into indentured servitude as a girl.

Tiny Pieces of Skull is concerned with the kind of woman Annabelle is becoming or can

become. Natasha is endlessly needling Annabelle about her body and her general

comportment as woman, and there’s rarely a reason to add the predicate of “trans woman” to

her advice: she is the narcissistic sexy friend who is entirely happy to read other femmes when

they appear to fail her precepts of beauty and womanly behavior. Still in London, she notes to

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Annabelle over forbidden dessert: “you’ll never be a woman if you eat that cream cake” (TPS,

1), and she means it literally. If Anabelle fails to conform to Natasha’s sense of womanliness,

then the former shall not become a woman at all. Becoming in Natasha’s sense means

embodying an extant form, a form of which she is the ideal. In London, though, Anabelle has an

alternative set of models and prescriptions for becoming. Her friend Magda worries about this

former model and speaks in thinly-coded terms about what Natasha represents. Magda warns

Anabelle: “You’re not just trying to become a woman, you’re trying to become [Natasha’s] sort

of woman” (TPS, 9)—i.e. a woman who trades on her sex appeal, a woman who moves through

a criminal underworld, and a woman who has weaponized a version of femininity that Magda

reads as anti-feminist. Even at this nascent stage of her becoming, Anabelle does not deign to

deny any of Magda’s claims, instead attempting a neutralization of sorts, noting that Natasha

“doesn’t really have many options apart from trying to be gorgeous” (TPS, 10). Anabelle here

depicts a model of becoming as foreclosure of options, and many of these novels by focusing on

slices of life “after” transition suggest trans embodiment as a measuring of options

allowed/prohibited/encouraged/left open by the Master’s decrees. Trying to be gorgeous is

not a last resort for Natasha, but it is one of “not many” options, and the most critical element

of this formulation is the “trying” bit—becoming must be aspirational to retain its political

volatility and revolutionary potential.

In Mucus in My Pineal Gland, Julianna Huxtable emphasizes this fungibility—this anti-

teleology—in becoming as she writes “monogamy died and was reincarnated” as “ steady

singular love of mutability and continual shape-shifting” (MPG, 12). It is at first an odd

formulation: what does monogamy have to do with shape-shifting, and why reincarnation? But

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perhaps the through-line is hetero/homonormativity. If monogamy as a rule of amative

coupling is ballasted by preserving reproductive relationships, then it dies when faced with an

equally strong commitment to promiscuous shape-shifting. The reincarnation is the “steady

singular love”: perhaps we cannot separate ourselves from a Western religio-ethical sense of

monogamy and “growing old” together as the height of human relations, and so must

reincarnate—emphasis on the “carn” of carnal—this devotion to mutability. A becoming never

to be a became. But Huxtable adds a more individualistic, possibly carnal/fleshly dimension a

bit further on, detailing “the becoming that I perform with each confrontation with my face,

hyperbolizing the she-elements of my flesh with brushes, bustiers and carefully proportioned

jewelry” (MPG, 41, author’s emphasis). Becoming as confrontation with one’s own

selfrepresentation means hyperbolizing extant elements of what is to become. The choice of

gerund is noteworthy for those that are not chosen: hyperbolizing is not accentuating elements

of one appearance, but also not supplementing or simply altering them, either. To hyperbolize

is to amplify what is already present to the point of stretching beyond credulity, and nothing is

made hyperbole without comparison to the quotidian, the mundane, or the simply descriptive.

Huxtable offers becoming as excess.

T Fleischmann offers a final model of minoritarian becoming, one based on architecture

and experiment. Jack Halberstam writes, “trans* bodies represent the art of becoming, the

necessity of imagining, and the fleshly insistence of transitivity” (T*, 136), each next definite

article in the list resounding in its certainty. Also certain is the lexical verb—“represent”—

against which this study has thus far resisted and repelled. But then, it is always first in some

way bodily that trans becomings—in all their potential artfulness—are represented in this

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minor literature. The arts of becoming are myriad, and they do not follow simple models of

evolution or development, though they do in some ways designate craft and rehearsal.

Fleischmann notes that building things and working with their hands makes them think “I am

the one who makes my body different” (TT, 12, author’s emphases). It is the reflection of craft

and art-making that serves as a reminder of their own self-construction and constructedness.

The cliche of writing one’s own story is deterritorialized as making one’s own body, and making

it different. Later, Fleischmann comments on learning of some of the effects of T-blockers:

“This sense that I’m an experiment, that I am coming together. […] Within the parameters of

myself, it has always been what is unknown, actually, that most bleeds into other dimensions”

(TT, 128). It is a somewhat ambiguous formulation that seems to be striving for its own

mutability. An experiment is generally built on a range of desired, expected, or possible

outcomes; in the case of testosterone blockers, this range would include outward

characteristics that match inward selfrepresentations. But coming together is inductive rather

than deductive, it turns the “scientific” denotation of experiment on its head, and leads to the

unknown bleeding into other dimensions. Not knowing or not having to know, perhaps, is

conditioned by what the minoritarian subject is permitted or expected to know under the

Master’s censure. Fleischmann writes, on the conditions of possibility for trans becoming:

“Isn’t it strange to grow up in a culture where your own experience is so completely erased that

you don’t even realize you’re possible until your early twenties?” (TT, 87). That does sound

strange, to have one’s experience erased under the auspices of culture, but it is the latter, tardy

realization—that you’re possible—that is the most quizzical. It cannot be a self-realization in

the strictest sense, unless there is some switch that could be thrown in one’s early twenties

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which suddenly overwhelms the Master’s acculturation. Realizing one’s possibility is the

ultimate deformation and deterritorialization of growth—it is minoritarian becoming in the

sense that Deleuze and Guattari mean that all becoming is minoritarian. A realization that

overwhelms erasure is the reterritorialization of minoritarian experience as minoritarian, and

minor literature is a space for not so much a recoding as simply a coding. Sycamore’s Alexa in

Sketchtasy has just such a realization when she notes—contrary to the Alcoholics Anonymous

dictate—“I don’t want to get over myself” (S, 231). The impulsion for the minoritarian subject

to get over themselves is the phobic public spheres’ breathless desire. Erase your experience,

fall in line, and keep it quiet doing so—minoritarian becoming is not getting over oneself.

Passing

The machinery of passing in minor literature seems predicated on a limited matrix of

questions: does the minoritarian subject desire to pass as a member of the majority? Does the

subject instead resist the majority by retaining a clear, outward minoritarian

identity/presentation? Are there instances in which one or the other is more desirable, and

what dictates that spectrum of distinction? In attempting to specify the shades of this choice to

trans passing, there is at least one additional field of consideration: is sex-gender expression de

facto commanded by the Master’s discourse, and thus must one consider the extent to which

one wants to participate in it at all? Is male/female, man/woman, masculine/feminine the

primary set of distinctions? Or is it queer/het, binary/non, trans/cis? If the terms seem entirely

set by the observer—passing in the eye of the beholder—then passing as regards the

minoritarian subject is a circuit of whether, as what, for whom, and how. A literature

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consumed with themes of passing would document an element of minoritarian experience, but

it would also be one prepossessed by the phobic public spheres—it would be a reception

history of transness and its discontents.

Instead, consider the passings of this minor literature in a manner similar to the

becomings above: how does becoming-minor conflict with passing-major? More directly, how

is the novel a useful strategy for minor literature that wants to fail to pass as majoritarian? In

retaining its political revolutionary force, its communitarian value, and its most powerful

deterritorializations, minor literature paints passing as an opportunity to fail. Jose Esteban

Muñoz considers his disidentification “interiorized passing” (D, 108, author’s emphases). In

this, he notes that “passing is often not about bold-faced opposition to a dominant paradigm or

a wholesale selling out to that form” (ibid), and instead can be disidentificatory, co-

opting/working on or against dominant forms. These two concepts of what “passing is often

not” can be applied as options for passing of which the Master’s logic admits: either oppose

the paradigm (and there is indeed room for forcefully non-binary, genderfuck, agender sets of

presentations and identity-formation), or sell out (which smacks of the Halberstam’s “border

wars” feminisms, wherein certain feminists accuse trans men of reinforcing patriarchy, and

others take trans women to be masqueraders or vacationers to an oppressed subject position

into which they were not born). This minor literature stretches out into a far more incendiary

and varied set of disidentificatory passings, and what follows charts when they co-opt and

when they work on or against what.

To this end, a central divergence in strategies for expressing passing: first, the passing of

Nevada is that of trans passing. Its protagonist, omniscient narrator, and secondary “egg”

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characters speculate on and theorize trans passing according to situations within which one is

or is not read as trans. Its protagonist’s experience is marked by failing not to pass, and

deciding what that means. On the other hand is Little Fish, which speculates on a wide range of

passings, but none with any greater particular depth or weight than the other. The trans

femme friends read passing at a variety of registers, but their experiences and thinking perhaps

ultimately leave open whether passing is desirable in perpetuity, restrictive as another of the

Master’s confinements, or alternating between the two. In one way of speaking, the former

novel offers a range of readings of trans passings while the latter transes a range of passings.

Right from the onset of Nevada, Maria Griffiths conditions the reader to note the

absence of her failure to pass: “Nobody even reads me as trans anymore” (N, 4). This

statement somewhat shifts the onus of passing from the beholder to the subject; does Maria

read herself as trans anymore? The answer is: sometimes, or maybe even often, as she is faced

with a variety of reminders of her transness beyond misgendering or being read as trans. This is

to say, it’s still worth concealing, prompting her to later wonder: “Do you just do irresponsible

within boundaries, so fuckers don’t end up figuring out you’re trans?” (N, 104). Irresponsibility

is a chief value and pathology within the narrative, as it puts in sharp relief the phobic public

spheres’ conception of responsibility. But “doing irresponsible” cautiously, boundedly, is an

interesting means of masking one’s trans status. It immediately provokes a range of doings

which might risk revelation or exposure; Maria doesn’t get read as trans anymore, sure, but

that doesn’t mean she couldn’t be. Regarding her general discomfiture with being read

“appropriately,” it’s “still weird to be called Miss,” and likely will always be, so long as genitals

and bodies make clothes not fit correctly, or “until you’re rich” (N, 17). It’s a lovely binary that

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would be rather illegible in a major literary frame. The opposite of clothes fitting incorrectly is

bodies being well-suited for clothes, either due to sex-gender morphology or the assumptions

of those manufacturing those clothes. One’s hips, shoulders, or bellies are too wide or too

narrow, a shirt is too masculine, feminine, or age-inappropriate, etc. Here, though, the

opposite of clothes fitting incorrectly is not feeling weird being called Miss. Or, if one prefers, a

certain level of wealth will, assumedly, allow one to make any clothes fit—either due to

tailoring of the fabric or the body—and then, too, it won’t any longer be weird to carry the

feminized honorific. Note the deterritorialization of passing: no longer is it strictly how one is

read, it is being read at all, and the way in which that reading inflects back on the subject being

read. What is the opposite of feeling weird?

Maria sits at a 24-hour diner in busy Williamsburg, Brooklyn after bars have closed, and

knows “there are situations where, if you are trans, you are going to get read as trans, and it is

going to be a situation” (N, 50). There are valences (or Venn diagrams) to passing here, levels

unique to the minoritarian subject faced with the potential for latent public phobias to become

overt. First, the situation itself, in this case the proximity of young, drunk hipsters and faux-

poor malcontents. Second, the precondition of being trans; there is of course nothing stopping

cis folks from being misgendered or read as trans, generally speaking. Third, the likelihood, nee

certainty, of being read as trans—an “accurate” reading, one supposes, but not any less

potentially violent or more comforting for so being. Finally, the manner in which this

identification is causally linked to “a situation,” which is at best neutral and irritating, and at

worst aggressive and traumatic. As Maria braces herself for what might follow, she entreats:

“can I get twenty minutes where I don’t think about being trans, please?” (N, 50). The less

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immediate but more salient version of this prayer is: what does it take to get twenty minutes

where I don’t think about being trans, thanks. As much of an authority as Maria is on doing

trans, her own thinking about passing has more to do with being reminded of her being trans

than it does “succeeding” at being gendered according to her identity and preference. Notably,

the scenario in which she is most concerned with “hard passing,” or not just being read as a

woman, but making it seem overtly worthwhile and preferable to be read as such, is as she

prepares to introduce James to his own egg status. Maria pauses as she considers this

conversation and the shapes it might take, wondering if she ought to have made herself up in a

more unassailably-femme manner. She thinks, “if you’re going to talk about being trans it

would’ve been nice to put on some small show of” how pretty, poised, and together a trans

woman can be (N, 191). Here, then, a bridge to the reterritorialization of passing: passing (and,

by extension, authenticity) as a strategy to coax and comfort other gender delinquents, a ruse

de guerre in the battle for recognized sex-gender fungibility, a mask which reveals what is

behind it, rather than obscuring it. Passing from Maria to James is assurance that one can pass,

that possibility is limited only by skill, and that skill can be developed and close-to-perfected,

even without money or perfectly-fitting clothes.

Wendy and her trans femme family approach the entire enterprise of passing from a

different origin. She finds “comfort” in Sophie’s certainty that “you will never win” at “the cis

game” (LF, 125). By now the minor literary reader knows to ask, as goes minor literature’s

deterritorializations of progress and success, why would anyone want to win at that? Casey

Plett presents Wendy’s passing not as a foregone conclusion, but as a game to be played, and a

game that could always be lost, regardless of how successful one has been in the past.

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Furthermore, Wendy’s trans identity is something to be protected and navigated through, both

inseparable and distinct from any identity as “woman.” On this note, “Wendy knew how to

deal with looking cis and she knew how to deal with looking trans, but she would never, ever

figure out how to be both” (ibid). The distinction in verbs is decisive here: Wendy has

cultivated strategies for “dealing with” being perceived different ways to different observers,

but “being both” cis and trans is an impossibility. She continues, marveling at and bemoaning

“How the world could treat her so differently—within days or hours” (ibid). So is passing

another chimera? It is not. Minoritarian passing, even when it seems most tenuous or beyond

the subject’s control, has direct impacts on minoritarian lives. Jack Halberstam asks what kinds

of truths we demand of the lives of people who pass, cross-dress, or simply refuse normative

gender categories (QTP, 48), and the answers are myriad. But this question could be reframed

as: who determines truth as regards passing, and is passing or failure to pass “truer” in a given

encounter? Wendy notes that “passing as cis for the first time” causes her to become “demure

and weak” in order to keep passing (LF, 100-101). This suggests passing as either/both

desirable to perpetuate or/and fundamentally restrictive and altering. Passing as a skill and

cultivated strategy is reterritorialized slightly differently, as goal and cost of achieving that goal

continuously.

Wendy dislikes her voice, in no small part as it is a potential impediment to passing. She

describes it as at times “low and unsexily raspy, passing like a female Tom Waits” (LF, 28). This

description itself might pass as hyperbolic, though Waits himself has commented on the ways in

which AMAB singers all have a woman inside them. He noted, about Mick Jagger: “When he

sings like a girl, I go crazy” (Guardian, 3/20/2005), and reflects on his own moments of letting

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the “girl” inside him out to sing.9 In a slightly earlier interview, he responds to the interviewer’s

wondering if his wife Kathleen sings on a certain track: “No, that’s me. That’s my female voice.

I got a big girl in me” (Magnet, No. 65, Oct/Nov 2004). But, of course, Tom Waits is not trying

to pass for anything; his particularity or singularity as a singer is a large element of his appeal.

The point is rather that Waits is pleased when he and his favorite singers are able to sing like

girls, it’s a strength for them, whereas for Wendy it’s an anti-passing—presenting femme,

sounding masc—and one which she does not select for herself. This is a sign of the imminent

revocability of passing, one which periodically-but-perfunctorily troubles Wendy, but on which

she does not dwell, adept as she is at writing off things she cannot control regarding her own

character while somewhat obsessing over those she cannot control in others. She thinks, “it

didn’t matter how often you passed, it could always be taken away. Always. She’d never be

little, she’d never be fish. It could always be taken away” (LF, 101). Passing is a fulcrum point

for minor literature. It is a necessarily political component of minoritarian subject positions,

because failure to pass, whether intentional or not, negatively suggests a future world in which

passing is unnecessary, outmoded, obviated. It is a compulsory politics—Halberstam cites an

“economics of impersonation” in gender passing: there are few material gains, but these kinds

of passing damage “investments made in conventional gender, sexuality, and domesticity”

(QTP, 73). Wendy does not set out to damage these investments, of course. Her thought,

seemingly one of resignation, structures passing as an attained status which can then later and

always be taken away/back. It is not that passing status must be or is automatically taken

away, but that the potential for it to be is omnipresent. Furthermore, and with the acute

9 See “Johnsburg, Illinois,” “Dead and Lovely,” “Bend Down the Branches,” among many others.

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awareness of the minoritarian subject, she notes what she will never be, cannot pass as, and

what in fact maintains the necessity of passing—not being little, not being fish. The trap is to

take identity as purely negatively defined; the novel (and, really, all of the novels) present

characters who are mandatorily excessive of their subject position. Wendy cannot figure how

to be trans and be a woman at once, but she can decide how and when to become, at least

within or against a certain matrix of the Master’s possibilities. Passing is hardly escaping these

possibilities, but in damaging investments, it devalues the conventions which codify gender

binaries and all the resulting potential violences and traumas associated therewith.

So Maria Griffiths tends to pass and theorizes her own passing and Wendy tends to pass

and is concerned with it almost exclusively when she notes her own potential to fail. To these

circuits of passing and becoming can be added Thom’s narrator in Fierce Femmes, for whom

both passing and failing to pass are matters of being misread. Kimaya tells her, shortly after

their first meeting: “You know you’re fish, right?” (FF, 60). It is a question that bears a number

of potential, and potentially simultaneous, inflections. So early in their relationship, this could

be read as jealousy, rendering fish as a status both difficult (or impossible, as Wendy notes

above) to attain and desirable. It could also be pejorative, though less so if Kimaya is already

aware, and she is, that the narrator is a trans woman. Thus it could be complimentary,

suggesting the narrator resembles so closely a cis woman that it is difficult to read her one way

or the other. But each of these betrays varieties of trans solidarity that emphasize trans as a

polluted, devalued subject position. To be jealous is to suggest that there is an ideal to be

sought in trans becoming, a telos for transition after which it is over and done with. This would

make trans a transitory state, and minoritarian subject positions cannot be permanently passed

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through, as conduits to something else. For the question to be pejorative is to claim that there

exists the status of being excessively cis-womanly, and that one’s status in trans becoming can

be moved transcended to the point at which fish is a bridge too far. And even to be

complimentary, which is the most likely of the three if in fact one reading has prominence over

the others, is to note that to be fish is admirable and worthy of recognition. It draws a

distinction from the status of “not fish,” a label for which there may not be an immediate and

singular name. But again, fish at best means “really successful trans femme” and at worst,

“looking too much like a (certain version of a) feminine cis woman.”

But then, with this question Kimya instigates a state of being; the narrator “is” fish, not

looks, nor acts, nor passes as fish, save that fish is itself a state of passing. Furthermore, the

question seems rhetorical and comforting, given the asker and the scenario in which it is asked.

Fish feels aspirational here, in a way different from the one in which it was impossible for

Wendy in the previous examples. And in this instance, the narrator offers a couple of her own

definitions to consider: fish “means people will look at me and not know that I am a trans girl,

that danger and lies and emptiness flow under my skin” (ibid). In this iteration, fish is

“full”/hard passing, an internalized status: no one else calls you fish, you are trans and pass as

cis, so you are, for yourself and others who know your trans status only, fish. But there is

more—being a trans girl makes the narrator dangerous, it is in no small part the fierceness in

her femme, and her most notorious lie. This trifecta is both strength and burden, and the

question is in part how much of this strength results from the “lie” of fish status, or the

“betrayal” of one’s trans girl status in not being perceived as such. The narrator puts a finer

point on this betrayal: “to me, fish means beautiful, means glamorous, means doesn’t look

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trans” (ibid, author’s emphases). This draws a clearer binary, however bearing in mind the

narrator’s admission “for me”; perhaps not “for all.” Of course again, “doesn’t look trans” is

not equivalent to “isn’t trans,” but the statement forces the reader to again consider what the

opposite of passing might be: un-beautiful/ugly, unglamorous, etc. Inherent to minoritarian

passing is a certain hierarchicalization, one of which Kimya reminds the narrator is expressed as

privilege. This reminder forces a reterritorialization from the latter: “fish means jealousy

among femmes” (FF, 62, author’s emphasis). Passing is all of these things at once in minor

literature, it is a cipher for shifting identity and (un)self-determined sex-gender expression. The

narrator tends to pass and wonders if she is leaving something behind in each passage,

surrounded as she is with unselfconscious, if not always proud than certainly outwardly and

inwardly fierce, trans femmes. This is minoritarian passing with adjunct prepositions: passing

as, passing through, passing away, passing towards. What it has in common with the two

previous models is that the minoritarian subject cannot avoid theorizing and being an expert on

their own passing; minor literature allows for the working out of these theories and this

expertise.

To put a (provisional) bow on passing, a few instances of minoritarian passing and

failure to pass which add texture to the deterritorialization of majority status, before moving on

to concepts of authenticity. Paul’s is obviously one of the more complicated cases, but some of

his most instructive passing moments are those based on self-reflection rather than reaction

from others. These add up to a tapestry of instances both empowering and dangerous, and

again drive the thesis that even having full and rather instantaneous command of one’s sex-

gender presentation is hardly the panegyric against dysphoria and anxiety. Passing is

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contrasted with something other than failure to pass; when the latter is impossible, the former

is neutered. Early on, before he has availed himself of the full scope of his powers, Paul is “glad

to be a known homosexual” as “it allowed him a daring way with girls” (PMG, 26). Here, it is

important to pass as gay in order to exercise a queer interest in women—Paul has sex with men

as both Paul and Polly, but has sex with women only as the latter. Queer Paul wants nothing

more than to be “daring” with them. As he reflects on pictures of himself in his Michfest

excursion, he cannot believe himself as a “hot girl,” but “there he was, four times a lady” (PMG,

118). His passing as Polly is never tested further than in his own discerning eye, and this

moment cements it. Wendy looks at photos, Jack Sheppard and others look in mirrors, but this

kind of encounter from a character who the reader imagines would harbor no doubt or

reservations regarding their passing is unique, and repeated. In an alley in which Paul is hoping

to have his first full-scale heterosexual encounter as a woman, Paul is excited as he notes he

“was totally passing with a straight guy” (PMG, 141). This passing is sufficient to lead to what

amounts to a quotidian variety of heteronormative sexual assault, Polly’s initial consent taken

to mean she no longer has any say regarding limits in the encounter. This is passing not to be

believed, perhaps because it is not passing at all, but embodying, a key distinction that may

move closer to the concept of masking.

Misreading

The final category of failed/deformed passing this study considers is a kind of

misreading, not to be confused with the (mis)recognition examined later in this chapter.

Misreading here is based on a kind of uncertainty, whereas misrecognition will in fact rely on

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certainty which is betrayed or revealed as inaccurate or insufficient. Paul, in encountering the

trans Franky, “looked him up and down for girl, but couldn’t find any tells” (PMG, 260). The

lack of tells render Franky less legible to Paul, and almost certainly further from the latter’s own

experience of transformation. The Fierce Femmes narrator has a not dissimilar experience with

“a boy” in her brief experience on a college campus. The boy seems to be soliciting her in the

most obvious and clumsy of ways when he asks “A girl who like to read?” She replies,

reasonably, “You’re surprised that girls read?”, to which he rejoins, “No way […] I used to be a

girl who liked to read.” There would be a clever opening for a twinned interpretation here: is

he no longer a girl, does he no longer like to read, or both? Naturally, the first reading is the

only “correct” one, though the narrator responds with the rather plaintive and blush-inducing “I

couldn’t tell” (FF, 105). This complete passing is interesting in itself, but it has a deeper

implication for minoritarian passing as communitarian solidarity. The narrator “couldn’t tell”

because she isn’t trying to tell; the Master’s social conditioning has not tuned up her own

phobias to clock the boy, and yet she is genuinely heartened as she notes, “the distance

between us has grown smaller” (ibid).

The very open question for minor literary expression is: what exactly has reduced the

distance? One could argue that all literature concerns relationships between setting/historical

backdrop, characters, omniscient narrators, authors, and readers, and the manipulation of

distance between them. The Grand Literary Tradition(s) relies on lineages which mark these

distances such that they remain sufficiently legible decades and centuries later. But how one

reads the attenuation of distance here says a great deal about the potential of minor literature

more broadly. The narrator may simply be noting the shared experience of interacting with the

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world as a minoritarian subject, and specifically as a trans person. Or perhaps the distance has

lessened because it would have been much greater were he a cis man, as the narrator had

initially read him. Or, in a different, though possibly related register, she feels closer because

there is a burgeoning (and somewhat typical) mutual attraction, growing through their fast

familiarity. In any case, he is the only masc person who does not loom as immediate and

omnipresent threat, and so the distance would have been justifiably great to begin with.

Failure to pass becomes a marker of familiarity, congeniality, and even trust between a fierce

femme and a bookish masc.

But intentionality is the grand unspoken in many cases of passing—how hard does one

try, and what are the stakes? For the latter, the answer tends to be the threat of violence,

leading to a politics not of avoidance but of frontstage encounter; better to (attempt to)

command interactions, at least in many instances, than to run from them as a rule. This creates

instances of friction between minoritarian subjects and the assumptive phobic public spheres.

Minor literature is itself a stratagem for passing, theorizing and thematizing moments of

potential failure and, generally, some kind of overcoming. Krys notes, of the eventual, titular

Masker, who has obvious stakes and interest in “defeating” passing: “I know I don’t pass to

anyone who looks at me longer that a minute or two—but he sees me as a trans woman, rather

than just a crossdresser” (M, 25). He in fact sees her as both, his fetish colliding with a general

misogynistic, unquenchable thirst for power over. The authority to pass judgment, and then

what the range of available judgements is, looms large over predicting intention. Wendy, who

cannot be Little, can never be Fish, sees fit to attempt to pass to her grandfather’s friend, Anna,

who holds authority of another kind. Whereas the masker has a psycho-sexual authority in

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reading Krys “correctly,” Anna has the authority of history, and possibly the keys to a

queer/trans lineage that Wendy sees as vital to understanding her own trajectory. On these

grounds, Wendy peddles an extensive made-up boyfriend to Anna (LF, 250)—he is a Mennonite

who wants children—which is of course much more about what Wendy might want to be able

to say to Anna than anything the rather detached Anna wants or needs to hear. Still, the telling

makes “Wendy [feel] held” (ibid). After the lengthy discussion, Anna sees through Wendy’s

farce but exhorts the latter’s strength and declaims Wendy thinking she is weak, to the point at

which “you can’t actually do anything” (LF, 263-264). Wendy is in part paralyzed by the vacuity

of her own history, the fact that there is nowhere to look for a trans elder in her own bloodline.

The distance between them will never be lessened, it is fixed across a great gulf of time and

experience.

Passing assumed, passing as, always/never passing, failing to pass—reterritorializations

of the Master’s gaze and judgement at various speeds and degrees. Minor literature lends

minoritarian subjects command of their selfrepresentations in ways that reveal the stitches

between phobic public spheres and degraded subject positions. How one passes can never be

assumed or fixed, but what, situationally, marks their authenticity might be.

Authenticity

At a node between doubt and redefinition sits authenticity, because, as with all matters

minor identitarian, the questions remain: authentically what, and who says? Minor literature

authenticates through a process of imminent redefinition in the face of doubt, revaluing

markers of majoritarian success, reassessing how and whether this success is “real.” It is telling

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that there are only a handful of direct indications of medical gender-affirmative surgeries in the

texts at hand, and each of them carries with it serious doubts regarding authenticity and the

terms of necessity. Gayle Salamon notes that there exist many more “malleable” features than

genitals that are far more outwardly determinative of gender (AB, 180), but perhaps

“determinative” is the wrong metric when it comes to authenticity. Instead, it may be more

fruitful to consider a dialectical relationship between the seeming dichotomy of

authentic/inauthentic, not unlike those of becoming/non-becoming and passing/failing to pass.

Jack Halberstam suggests just such a weakening of binarity when he details how “queer

genders profoundly disturb the order of relations between the authentic and the inauthentic,”

original and mimic, real and constructed (QTP, 45). Fakeness, falseness, fantasy, and

inauthenticity are charges under which minoritarian subjects are forced to labor in a wide

spectrum of participation amidst (and often within) phobic public spheres. But what of the

obverse, constructing or just naming the authentic as an act of resistance to the Master’s

boundaries and thresholds. To open this line of thought, notes on surgical gender affirmation

mostly as a straw man of authenticity; this minor literature theorizes its subjects’ authenticity

from a far wider array10 of resistance perspectives.

Annabelle is faced with an incredibly sudden proposition of top surgery early in Tiny

Pieces of Skull. She considers both the immediacy of the opportunity and the consequences,

finally deciding, as regards transitioning, “I need to prove to myself that I mean it” (TPS, 21).

10 Minor literature admits of a different, wider matrix of possibilities and foreclosures. This could be allied with Halberstam’s approach in Female Masculinity, one which Muñoz references as well, to not just invert binaries but explode them, wherein typologies become almost ludicrous in their specificity. There are too many seeming shades and patterns of identity-formation to fit the neat categories of the Master’s Linnaean classifications.

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The proof comes in the more “permanent” act of going under the knife, but also the inherent

risk in going through with a rather unpremeditated medical procedure. But “meaning it” is

inherently risk-taking, which tends to be true regardless of surgery; meaning it is overcoming

obstacles both internal and external to sex-gender presentation and self-determination.

Annabelle is almost immediately challenged on her status as authentic woman via these new

breasts, to which she rejoins “my tits are real,” as “the opposite of real is imaginary” (TPS, 30).

It is a nice piece of hard-boiled wit in the midst of this novel of manners, but it could be the

case that, more generally, “an”—rather than “the”—opposite of real is imaginary. Making the

imagined real, proposing the imaginary as potential real, and defeating the imaginary for the

real are all equally apropos formulations, and the realness of Annabelle’s tits has limited impact

on her being charged with unreal-ness. Hennie, a cis woman, does not care if Annabelle

“means it” when she jealously accuses the latter of being “false, just pretending” as regards her

womanness (TPS, 131). Wendy’s bottom surgery, on the other hand, challenges her

authenticity somewhat in a sex working context, but otherwise has little bearing on how her

realness is deemed in the narrative of Little Fish. Whereas she fails to anticipate a potential

issue with no longer having a bio-penis in the context of her sex work, she is openly concerned

about the context of a blind date, asking Sophie: “Is he weird about shit?” Sophie interprets

this fear doubly, assuring Wendy “I fucked him,” which in a certain sense ought to be enough to

assuage her, but continuing “and you have a vagina” (LF, 37, author’s emphasis). The vagina is

certainly not, for either Sophie or Wendy, a marker of greater authenticity, but it is proposed as

insulation from potential embarrassment or harm for this impending date. Quite the contrary

for trans elder Sally in The Masker, in which she distinguishes herself from the titular cross-

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dressing “freak” (M, 19) by virtue of her “pussy,” aka “Miss Muffin,” which makes her “a real

woman” (M, 23). She drives this point home in similar terms slightly later: “That freak is not a

woman” (M, 39). This drives a series of questions as to the masker’s motivations: is he trying to

be a woman? What does it change for Sally if he is? Authenticity is more than simply passing, it

is marked in ways inconsistent yet not easily revokable.

Jack Halberstam writes that “throughout the past century, trans* bodies have been cast

as unreal, inauthentic, and aberrant” (T*, 34), a trio of descriptors uniquely related in

minoritarian subjects. Authenticity, as noted above, requires a specific set of judgments and

thresholds which mark out a sufficiently relevant core of behavior, belief, expression, and

action. Aberration is deviation from agreed-upon norms from which the caster can proceed in

their judgement. But unreality is another matter: not fake, neither irreal nor surreal (as each of

these has some flavor of the real intermixed), but unreal, the opposition to reality, the negative

space which defines the real. Trans unrealness is cis realness, and whoever would cast bodies

this way means to derive a positive definition of “real” from eliminating what they see as the

coherent category of “trans* bodies.” Though Maria Griffiths is not especially prepossessed

with the matter throughout Nevada, she does early on note that she “kind of hates” her cis

girlfriend “for just automatically getting” her genitals “for free” (N, 3). There is a kind of

authenticity in selecting, in not being given anything; why would anyone be more authentically

man who just happens to be born with sex characteristics that the medical industrial complex

has determined sufficiently meet a “male sex” checklist? Hateworthy though she may be,

Steph’s choices regarding gender do not resemble Maria’s in a host of meaningful ways. And

yet, the constant burden of proof placed on trans people is thematized variously. Maria grits,

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“there is this dumb thing where trans women feel like we all have to prove that we’re totally

trans as fuck and there’s no doubt in our minds that we’re Really, Truly Trans” (N, 41, author’s

capitalizations). Does authenticity means proof, or does it mean not requiring of proof? This

minor literature deterritorializes identity from proof-demanding phobic public spheres of

medical science and cultural signifiers, to reterritorialize it in communitarian care and

revolutionary political potential. Maria’s theses on transness are narrated in a manner that

could be extrapolated to all minor literature: for the community, then the individual, then

everyone else who bothers to read it. It is a narrative burden that creates tension and anxiety

throughout Nevada. Maria avers, “when you are trans, you are supposed to know everything

about men and everything about women and the ways they interact” (N, 99). “Supposed” does

not just mean “obliged,” but also “assumed,” and knowing everything can be read as equivalent

to knowing nothing. It can be simultaneously, authentically, true that “sometimes it seems like

being trans is the only bad thing that has ever really happened to Maria” (N, 121) and “Maria is

really good at being trans” (N, 174). “Being really good at” references adaptation and political

resistance, “bad thing […] happened to” is all about imposition from the outside. There is no

being trans without a “being cis,” and in the Master’s eyes, being trans is indeed a bad thing to

happen, with no good thing as its obverse. Minor literature can revaluate values according to a

variety of different metrics, and one can “do minor” in equally many, but “being minor” has

perhaps a smaller range of possibilities. The subject, the public, the Master, and the

community all cast ballots for authenticity.

Thus Steph, whose breakup with Maria essentially opens the novel, can accept all of the

above and still have a word regarding Maria’s authenticity. While Maria can be jealous of

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Steph’s de facto genitals, Steph recognizes a series of falsities in Maria’s selfrepresentations,

which the former sees fit to detail (to herself) in the aftermath of their splitting (N, 118-120).

First, there is Maria’s perpetual and cyclical experiencing of revelations after which nothing

actually changes. One of these cycles plays out in the arc of the novel, and it is noted more

than once that it is not the first such attempt at revelatory self-discovery. Steph reads this

iterative pattern as fake and inauthentic, rather than as failed or even deluded. A second put-

on is Maria’s very vague and, to Steph, privileged punk ethics, which allow for all the individual

expression and none of the political or communitarian action. There is substantial evidence for

this charge in the novel, though it is less clear that Maria thinks herself genuine or authentic in

her punk-ness. The reader is never given the requisite debate and laying out of a case for either

side; minor literature does not require the same measuring of proof.11 Finally, and perhaps

most damningly, Steph reads Maria’s sexuality as a put-on, as the latter fakes orgasms and

seems not to harbor genuine lesbian desire. Once again, though, the reader is forced to

wonder at Steph’s evidence for Maria ever purporting to be genuine in her sexual desires.

Inauthentic are the ways in which perception jars with the backstage reality to which Steph has

become privy. Minor literature challenges not only metrics of authenticity, but the very

judgement thereof—not just how are you judging authenticity, nor who are you to judge, but

why are you judging at all?

11 Deterritorialization of the novelistic form does involve certain formal characteristics. The lack of prehistory or justification for transness (and minoritarian subject positions more broadly) is absolutely a feature of this literature, though. None of the protagonists needs to explain why they bother with various stages or depths of transition; there is no Chekhov’s gun of gender expression.

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But authenticity of the flesh and authenticity of identity inflect authenticity of the text

itself. What would it mean for minor literature to pass as canonical, Grand Tradition(al),

majoritarian? Jean Genet wrote of wanting his books to find their way to the bedside tables of

the bourgeoisie; James Weldon Johnson wrote his novel into college literature syllabi alongside

contemporaries Woolf and Joyce; today, Chuck Tingle touts his Hugo Prize nominations as a

sign of majoritarian influence and recognition. Of these, Genet is in a certain sort of canon that

the other two likely will never be, in no small part due to the cult of personality around his

biography, and his famous friends and interlocuters both in his day and after. But to be/come

major is the conundrum of minor literature: at what moment might it lose its minoritarian

power and expediency? Of the works under consideration, none thematizes authenticity of the

text quite like Confessions of the Fox. The ostensible narrator/annotator, Dr. Voth, is essentially

an archivist, and one who is self-aware and entirely willing to impart his personal experience

onto the text he is annotating. As he wrestles with the story of Jack Sheppard’s travails, Voth is

forced to first consider its signal appearance, and then disentangle how much of it may

be…accentuated…by the Stretchers’ editorial inclusions. In a critical moment which represents

the nexus of eroticism, capitalist subterfuge, and trans storytelling/mythmaking, Voth finds

himself intoxicated (literally and figuratively) with Ursula, his pharmacist and flirtatious interest

of some time. They end up, apparently organically, arriving at the subject of the manuscript,

about which Ursula provokes him: “Have you figured out yet if it’s authentic?” In isolation, it is

a query that should perhaps raise an eyebrow, but as Voth presents the exchange, it feels

natural enough. Still, Voth misreads the inquiry as erotic solicitation, noting “she’s trying to say

something, signal something to me” (CF, n76). But Ursula presses the line, and the sexual

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charge: “You said it’s really queer though—or trans, or whatever […] And is that, like—bites her

lip—authentic?” It is a very particular term, authentic, and when it is revealed that Ursula is

acting as surrogate for the behemoth publishing conglomerate, P-Quad, that choice of term is

less unusually specific. Nonetheless, in the heat of a romantic moment, “authentic” becomes

bodily, sexual, which it certainly is throughout the Sheppard narrative as well. Voth sees it as

necessary to note Ursula’s attraction as not out of the ordinary, and is in a certain way

fetishizing his own transness when he professes: “you’d be surprised how many women like

getting fucked by an unclassifiable monster” (ibid). Again, in isolation this statement takes on a

grotesque kind of self-pollution, but here it puts Voth in solidarity with the chimeras and sex-

gender curiosities of the main narrative. He adopts the minoritarian designation of monster

with a kind of pride and rage, not unlike Susan Stryker’s (1994) solidarity with Frankenstein’s

monster. The P-Quad representative, Sullivan, is giddy with excitement at the concept of

publishing “the earliest authentic confessional transgender memoirs in Western history” (CF,

n122), but the precise impetus for his excitement is never entirely clear. Publishing the

“earliest” anything is perhaps a value in itself, but popular interest in “historical confessional

transgender memoir” is somewhat curious. Still, “authentic” looms large, and ends up

representing a mystique which prepossesses Voth to the point where he must abscond with the

document altogether. Only he can protect and reify the authenticity of the manuscript, which

is in no small part accomplished via the audience to which he hope to deliver it.

While Sullivan is constantly pressing Voth for images and explanations of more visceral,

anatomical details, Voth’s own markers of authenticity are of a quite separate, and sometimes

even contradictory, valence. Sullivan represents a number of phobic public spheres overlapping

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and intersecting to medicalize, historicize, and sanitize this particular trans narrative. Voth is

more than happy to find himself in the text, and use his own responses as barometer for

authenticity; he deterritorializes evidence in the same way as do the Stretchers, before he even

realizes that they have had their hands on and in the manuscript. Voth considers “the jealousy

(nay, misery) the text provokes” in him, as someone who presumably has not had a love like

Jack and Bess’s, “a register of its ‘authenticity’” (CF, n91, author’s emphasis). An account might

be factual, and it might even be real, but authentic requires something perhaps beyond

mimesis or verisimilitude: particular emotional response. What begins as interest and surprise

at the revelation of Jack Sheppard’s status as trans masculine person evolves into empathic

(dis)identification with the emotional tenor of his story, and finally recognition that certain

narrative choices reinforce the authenticity of the text. Voth footnotes the “elegant declining-

to-describe” as “strong evidence of the document’s authenticity” (CF, n109), contrasting this

choice with the medical obsession of certain antagonists in the text itself in classifying sex-

gender “chimeras.” He again cites this decision to not describe Jack’s “Transfixing Shape” (CF,

201, author’s emphases), as “further evidence of the document’s authenticity” (CF, n201). The

play on words is too overwhelming to escape note; authenticity is itself transfixed in this minor

literature, as textual and narrative authority is instrumentalized, both bating the reader to bring

their own assumptions and intuitions to bear and forcing them to interrogate the extent to

which their own reading is polluted by the Master’s propaganda in the phobic public spheres.

Juliana Huxtable engages authenticity with the most abrupt and radical movements of

any of the texts at hand. These movements combine—or perhaps collide, as in an atomic

collider—history, race, and proximity in ways that denude authenticity of explanatory force or

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saliency as a labeling device. Sometimes deterritorialization is especially violent, ripping the

narrative from the Master’s clutches and damning the consequences in so doing. Huxtable

writes: “If history was robbed, we take it back by peeling away at layers of Wikipedia debates

(subject line) re: authenticity” (MPG, 17). The corporatized internet, replete with recent efforts

to commandeer net neutrality and make it more difficult to protect devalued identities12, is

potentially the most phobic of public spheres. Huxtable considers time and authenticity as

coincidental commodities: the former is robbed and can be reappropriated, the latter is washed

away in debates backed only by “publicly sourced,” online knowledge. On either side of this

dialectic, the minoritarian subject resists by “peeling away” at history, not reclaiming but

reterritorializing authenticity as self-identification, self-becoming, self-imagination. Of the last

of these, Huxtable adds: “how I self-imagine unpacks at a deliberate pace, avoiding any parody

of the bodies I grow proximate to, ‘real women’” (MPG, 41). Authenticity bears on (a)history

and proximity/distance: Huxtable’s authenticity must avoid parody by being deliberate, and as

she grows proximate to, she will never fully intersect with ‘real women.’ In a text such as this,

there is little reason for scare quotes; Huxtable is marking a category distinction with her

inverted commas. First, “women” is deterritorialized as sex-gender category by the addition of

“real,” which casts doubt on a socio-medico-politico-cultural category that holds the most

instrumental power for the Master when clearly bounded. The quotes around the (un)fixed

construction, ‘real women,’ reterritorializes it as a category belonging solely to the phobic

public spheres—they can have ‘real women,’ and “we” will retain both “real” and “woman” for

12 See especially the still-recent SESTA/FOSTA bills and the pending, as of this writing (11/20), EARN-IT act, as well as a spectrum of de-platforming efforts by internet media entities themselves.

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communitarian, self-determinative designs. Any phobia Huxtable might herself betray

regarding being fish or being (in)authentic is negated by the realities of her corporeality. On

the one hand, she notes that she never believed “we have nothing to hide” as “I still have to get

my tuck right when I piss or shit” (MPG, 48). The bodily realities of self-presentation and self-

becoming are apparently omnipresent as “something to hide.” She presses further,

medicalizing and sexualizing sex-gender as burden: “It’s a disgusting hypertrophy that’s killed

my curiosity, sexual drive and desire for sex reassignment in one blow” (ibid). The bio-penis,

here identified only either as its negation—tuck—or its medicalization as overgrown, vestigial

appendage, is deterritorialized as trump-card marker of sex-gender but reterritorialized as killer

of sex drive and desire for its own removal. But more than that, it blocks a certain kind of

engagement with history and proximity for Juliana Huxtable: “the tuck beneath my petticoat

hiding the black member that betrays any claim to legacy-based entanglement with herstory

that I might have” (MPG, 172). It is, on the face of it, a devastating claim against authenticity.

But then again, the tuck, so practiced, even if despised, “hides” the betraying member.13

13 Whereas Juliana Huxtable notes the authenticity-jamb of the tuck, she asks/states, “Is the clit the origin and am I just a slut / Masquerading as a girl in hopes of getting fucked” (MPG, 40). This masquerade has a distinct purpose, sexual fulfillment, but the “just” in the first formulation is a central concern of the text: Huxtable likes/desires sex as a woman, so “just” being a slut would imply that any designs on womanness are purely sexual. It seems like the kind of non-question that implies its own negation—of course you’re not “just” a slut, and it’s fine if you are one, not that you said it wasn’t, but the clit is not the origin of your womanness or anything else, necessarily, so you go ahead and get fucked all you want. Huxtable has a certain nous for exploding these kinds of masquerades as thin veils over sexual desire, calling into question identitarian concerns that are the stuff of major literature and the Master’s hand-wringing. Her most pressing concern is when to let her light shine brightest and when to draw down the shades, the masks, around it, as she finds herself “muting creative and sexual impulses to appear amicable and digestible to those around me […] the biracial girl in a Target ad […] unassuming silhouette and profile, its Negro virility pacified” (MPG, 34). She hardly needs explain why a trans woman of color is especially concerned with amicability and digestibility; the politics of violence which greet the ornery and indigestible are far beyond being combatted through direct, individual resistance. Masking/lying is a strategy both for recognizing impending, latent violence and for deterritorializing the narratives that allow it to persist.

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Selfrepresentations are based in part on hiding, and thus authenticity is at least as much the

caliber and result of the hiding as it is whatever lies beneath. Minor literature thematizes and

parodies, theorizing authenticity through situations, relationships, and self-determinations that

require various manners of hiding. Minor literature’s hypothesis regarding authenticity is likely

null: there is no baseline for the authentic, other than being authentically inauthentic,

provisional, and willing to change. Next, a specific formulation of hiding for purposes adjacent

to or outside of passing, masking.

(Mis)recognition

Minoritarian identity is itself a tactic, a set of strategies to encounter and resist the

phobic public spheres, and to build community from the bottom up, rather than the top down.

Perhaps all fictive literature trades in strategies of identity-construction, “writing backwards”

from identitarian goals. But minor literature, in its disavowal of majoritarian telos and success,

find tactics—the means, rather than the ends—as sufficient narrative fodder. End-lessness is

balanced with beginning-lessness as regards time; dis-memory is met with no future as regards

identity. Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications is a text more concerned with tactics than

strategies14, and he notes directly that, first, misrecognition can be tactical (D,95). This section

will largely explore the tactics of (mis)recognition, both in its potentialities and its frustrations.

Muñoz further notes that misrecognition is reflexive, in that it can operate on the self. Few of

the novels under review operate from the first-person, but all have some sense of free indirect

discourse and narration sufficiently omniscient to gather moments of (mis)recognition and how

14 Perhaps Cruising Utopia is the opposite, considering the title. An interesting symmetry to consider.

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they do or do not self-inflect. Finally, among the instrumentalities of Muñoz’s tactical

misrecognition is resistance to public spheres. He notes that counterpublicity is born from a

modality of disidentification that is an act of tactical misrecognition as a bulwark against the

effects of dominant publicity(s) (D, 169, author’s emphases). Misrecognition is the stuff of

narrative in general, tactical (mis)recognition—I continue to en-glitch the parenthetical to hold

open the sliver of recognition in every misrecognition—is that of minor literature.

Nevada sets a trap in the apparent binarism of Maria’s and James’s trans stories. Maria

is the not-quite-anti-heroine of the novel, in the peculiar position of the narrative picking up

chronologically after any of the good things she’s done for others—as a friend, partner, or

internet expert on matters transfeminine. Still, she holds justified and practiced opinions and

intuitions that could be enormously useful as tools of disidentification and deterritorialization

for people in a certain proximity or, indeed, reading the novel itself. James, on the apparent

other hand, is Maria’s egg, unaware of the menu of options for his sissy or femme leanings,

trapped in a spiral of small town self-loathing that, too, would be recognizable to a range of

potential readers of the work. Recognizable, but disidentificatory. James’s self-

(mis)recognition begins in darkness, almost further enshrouded by girlfriend Nicole’s sense of

her own feminism and attraction to his non-masculinity. Just before Maria arrives on the

scene, James “has no idea what he looks like” (N, 144). There is a version of this novel, a major

literature one, perhaps, that positions Maria as the light in James’s darkness, where being seen

leads to sight—this is not that novel. Still, the first of these does maintain, as Maria thinks,

immediately on seeing him for the first time, “That kid is trans and he doesn’t even know it yet”

(N, 162). James is (mis)recognized and (mis)read according to signals he does not understand

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and certainly does not intend to signify transness. On the other side, a few sentences

exchanged between them, “on some level James has already figured out that this girl is trans”

and “he is having this desperate magnetic attraction to her” (N, 166). This is an unusually

declarative moment for Binnie, who tends to show rather than tell when it comes to such

relationships between characters. The ambiguity of “some level” is typical, though:

(mis)recognition proceeds from a variety of registers simultaneously, depending on recognition

on some levels, misrecognition on others, all subject to change depending on inputs. This

(mis)recognition is reflexive as well, prompting James to consider “it’s weird that he could tell

she was trans” (N, 169). Weird in that he has never met a trans person, weird in that his own

experience with gender experimentation has been so unsatisfying and underdeveloped, weird

that his “research” in the guideless archive of the internet has yielded only hyper-medicalized,

frankly transphobic results and not a blog such as Maria’s. The stages of (mis)recognition could

end here, “desperate magnetic attraction” aside, a passing encounter with Maria as she

continues west to nowhere, but Maria, as much out of boredom as humanitarian impulses,

wants to “help” James find his transness. This relationship will, for James, require a bit more

overt evidencing, and he finally asks Maria: “you’re trans, right?” (N, 189). Maria could not

have thought this query such an impossibility, and yet is so bound up in her own

(mis)recognition that she only at this moment ponders what it means to be asked this question,

by him, now. “Is that even rude?” she wonders, “it should be a value-neutral question, isn’t it?”

(N, 190). There are no value-neutral questions, of course, it is simply a matter of the

transactionality of the exchange. In this instance, James seeks to confirm a “fact” regarding

sex-gender of which he is already fairly certain: trans people exist, and thus one of them might

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finally find their path crossing his. There is little evidence that he considers the impact this

testimonial outing might have on his nascent relationship with Maria, but by moving the

burden of (mis)recognition to her, it is only a matter of time before she, justifiably, asks him

something similar. (Mis)recognition becomes a prime driver of minor literature, a machine of

deterritorialization which establishes, deforms, and recodifies subject position and status.

Maria (mis)recognizes herself to the reader, and James and Maria participate in an economy of

(mis)recognition that leaves them both phenomenally dissatisfied. It is less a matter of

pessimism or defeatism and more one of challenging what sex-gender satisfaction can look like

under the Master’s decree.

Maria’s “expertise” on her own transness is vast and varied, shifting situationally and

often based on resistance to what she perceives as common “public” assumptions regarding

trans women and their experiences. Minor literature asks what that kind of expertise means

outside of the phobic public spheres of epistemology, deterritorializing scientific fact as

pragmatic and pluralistic experience. Maria’s self-(mis)recognitions will rely on iterative

disidentifications, as well as her own sense of biographical borders and the diffuse public

(mis)recognizing her. She notes that, upon transitioning, “there is going to have to be some

intentionality in the way I present my body and actions,” which first suggests that as a middle-

class, white, cis-male, there did not have to be. She continues, “I am going to have to break the

patterns of clothing and voice and hair I’ve had in place all my life if I’m ever going to be read

the way I want to be read” (N, 124). The choice of terms here is indicative of the relative

surface nature of sex-gender representation: Maria recognizes the habituality of gender

markers, and that selfrepresentation is first a matter of being read the way one wants to be

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read. Whether it is anything more than that depends on the other party in the transaction: a

romantic partner, a potentially/likely trans person in a tiny desert town, one’s employer, a

physician, the state… Regardless, Maria recognizes a desire for (mis)recognition, and how much

she protects or reveals about her past self in her sex-gender selfrepresentation is de/limited by

commitment to breaking the above patterns. The rest of the signal moments of

(mis)recognition in the novel, however, play on Maria’s perceptions of public phobic (or even

not-so-overtly-phobic) conceptions of her minoritarian subject position. She describes the

“unsure, weird social footing” of being trans resulting from “never being sure who knows

you’re trans or what that knowledge would even mean to them” (N, 6). This, in one sense, is

the crux of minoritarian (mis)recognition: on one hand, not knowing how you’re being read, on

the other, not knowing what that reading “means.” Who knows and what knowledge means

are distinct, and the circuitry can be unpredictable. And exhausting. And ultimately, for Maria

Griffiths, as with so much of the (compulsory) theorizing about her sex-gender: “boring” (ibid).

The titular character of The Masker seems to exist outside the dialectic of

(mis)representation; by masking, he is subverting recognition of any kind. But the novella is not

ultimately about Felix, it is centered on Krys and her trans becoming. Krys’s range of

(mis)recognition is constitutive of a spectrum found in various manifestations in the other

novels. The Masker is himself a transphobe, and a misogynist to boot—trans* terminates in

transvestite, for him a category of fetish, and nothing else. In referring to his nemesis, the trans

woman Sally, as “it” (M,50), he is disgusted at her surgical transition, which removes her from

the category of fetish. As noted earlier regarding Tiny Pieces of Skull’s Annabelle, perhaps Sally

“means it” too much. Krys, as the object of his fetish, occupies a liminal space of

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(mis)recognition exemplified by her reaction to Felix calling her “princess”: “people overhear,

and each time feels like I’m being complimented and put in my place all at once” (M, 30). Krys

is (mis)recognized as a “princess,” which both affirms her excitement in what turns out to be

fairly heteronormative “mistress” arrangement for the married Felix and rankles her sense of

being condescended to. Felix and Sally represent two opposing views on trans becoming, but

they aren’t necessarily polar: Sally’s t4t is more akin to lesbian separatism than anything else,

and Felix seems to want to erase, or at least dismiss, the category of trans altogether. For Krys,

sex-gender experimentation and expression is something else. She offers a phenomenological

self-(mis)recognition: “I don’t know if I’m a man, but I just don’t really believe I’m a woman […]

I’ve never heard a girl talk about getting wet putting on a new dress” (M, 17). Krys finds herself

in an unrecognizable category, and thus is susceptible to both Sally’s and Felix’s expressions of

how Krys ought to be. (Mis)recognition is a skill, as upon meeting her, Krys notes “some lizard

part of my brain processes that she’s trans, even before I recognize her as Sally” (M, 30). This

circuitry is never attributed to cis people in this trans literature: to register someone as trans,

then gendered (“her”), then named (“Sally”). It is more than simply “knowing one’s own,” Krys

is (mis)recognizing and disidentifying with trans women even as she wonders about her place

among them. Sally offers an entirely different metric of (mis)recognition to Krys, emphasizing

always that the latter is a woman, needs to contend with that reality, and is obligated to

confront her family and friends with her womanness immediately. Even strangers will be able

to tell, as Sally “assures” Krys when they go to the salon that “even in your boy clothes,” the

hairdresser will “know you’re a girl” (M, 34). Sally is processing a surrogate (mis)recognition

that ignores its subject: the salon worker will know Krys is a girl even as she is entirely unsure.

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But perhaps “unsure” is the incorrect choice of term, or at least one that might serve to give

cover to the Master’s discourse on gender. At the very least, the Master says, be sure; only in

sureness can wrong or right, lie or truth be judged. This logic renders unsureness a weapon of

resistance, not just deterritorializing sex-gender, but refusing to reterritorialize it—to remap

it—onto the extant binaristic landscape.

Against this refusal to reterritorialize, a minor literary landscape of (mis)recognitions,

both self- and otherwise, which demonstrate affirmation. So tightly woven into the fabric of

identity formation and narrative is (mis)recognition that it would be insufficient to label it a

trope or theme: it is instead definitional to minor literature. It is never value-neutral, and

always seeks to affirm minoritarian subject position, for better or for worse. Towards the end

of Little Fish, Wendy sees trans sister/friend/lover Aileen and reads her in awe, equal parts

invective and admiration: “You are so goddamn unfairly fucking beautiful” (LF, 233, author’s

emphases). It is an aching (mis)recognition, disidentifying with Aileen’s beauty while rejoicing

in drinking it in. Wendy is sure about this other’s beauty, and unsure what exactly it signifies, if

it must signify one affect or conclusion at all. On other hand, Wendy wonders if former boss

Michael is “actually” romantically interested in her, as he “knows I’m a transsexual and he

knows I’m a drunk” (LF, 277). Pairing these polluted subject positions naturally begs a

comparison—which would be more potentially reprehensible to Michael? In what ways are

either/both habitual, diagnosable, readable, (mis)recognizable? The way he, an AMAB cis man,

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does or does not view the semiotics of recognition are inevitably distinct from how Wendy

reads his potential reading.15

As a first-person narrative, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars has a different tenor of

self-(mis)recognition, yet still presents it within a distinct, affirmative, cause-and-unexpected-

effect circuitry. Before her escape to the Street of Miracles, the narrator points out that the

Korean chicken vendor in her neighborhood “was the only person in those days who recognized

my womanhood” (FF, 24). The womanhood itself is a fact, though the recognition from the

chicken vendor is singular, perhaps even the narrator included. A bit further on, in the thick of

the violence and thrill of femmes bashing back, the narrator ventures a complete self-

disidentification: “I feel tired. I don’t want to be myself anymore” (FF, 121, author’s emphases).

The easy reading would be that the “fierce” element of her subject position has exhausted her

physically and emotionally; always rough and ready to defend or attack, always outnumbered,

always seeking better position. But to overlook the “femme” element of the self-

(mis)recognition would be a mistake. The narrator is fighting both towards herself as a member

of a community and away from herself, in the sense that all the violence overrides any onus to

“be myself,” as community self-protection is the clear prime directive. To turn political

resistance from purely defensive—always putting out the next fire—into positive action,

regardless of tactic, requires a powerful lever. The narrator has been training to be a fierce

femme through her entire adolescence, the reality (such as it is, in a story told by a reliably

15 Wendy ruminates on how much better liar she is as a woman, wondering if “maybe there is something to trans women as deceivers” (LF, 29, author’s emphases). It is a cheeky note, but whereas subterfuge and prevarication can be extremely bourgeois tools for success, they take on guises of survival and self-definition for the minoritarian subject. How does the Master deserve our truth? Wendy is expert at masking her pain with booze, her sexual desires with wit and caution, and her emotional labor as both sex worker and retail employee with practiced skill.

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unreliable narrator) is that she is physically prepared for the battle, but emotionally and

cognitively developing into her position in the community. (Mis)recognitions can occur

between, within, and astride minoritarian community, but the formative iterations seem to be

either self-(mis)recognitions or those external to community, and in Thom’s narrator can be

seen the positive tension between them.

These categories of communitarian and self (mis)recognition can be measured against

(mis)recognition as definitive of community in Confessions of the Fox. Bess and Jack’s

relationship realizes their minoritarian resistance through mutual (mis)recognition, as there

quickly is neither reason for either to pass around the other, nor is the currency of authenticity

especially valued. The moment of the literal revelation of Jack Sheppard’s body in the novel is

heavily anticipated in both manuscript and notes. Everyone, it seems, has some purchase on

Sheppard’s genitals: the editor Voth for self-identification and communitarian protection, the

publisher Sullivan for capitalist control of intellectual property and history, the lover Bess out of

curiosity for her own desires and attachment to a man—generally a species meant for income

alone—and Jack himself, as he endeavors to self-(mis)recognize into being the relationship

between his body, his name, and his love. Jack Halberstam offers a useful incision between

medicalized and affective sex-gender representation: “If the transsexual body has been

deliberately reorganized in order to invite certain gazes and shut down others, the transgender

body performs self as gesture not as will, as possibility not as probability, as a relation—a wink,

a handshake and as an effect of deliberate misrecognition” (QTP, 97, author’s emphasis).

Deliberate reorganization set in opposition to deliberate misrecognition, each left somewhat

open, in the passivity of the voicing—who reorganizes? Who misrecognizes?—as to who the

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active party might be. Still, the positive categories here are instructive: the transgender body

performs self as gesture, possibility, and relation, all couched in (mis)recognition. As Jack

wonders how he will reveal himself (in all senses) to Bess, he realizes he doesn’t know how “to

stay” or, perhaps better, “to stay Seen,” and to “show himself to her—as what?” (CF, 68,

author’s emphases and capitalization). Jack’s fugitivity is pervasive: “staying” has meant

captivity, as an AFAB person, as an indentured servant, as awaiting the gallows; “staying Seen”

has stood for occupying polluted subject positions of transsexual, orphan, and criminal. To

think Bess could be the cure-all for these undesirable and dangerous stayings seems

unreasonable, but (mis)recognition can be reterritorialized and revalued as a strong bond, in

the company of a sex-working, migrant, woman of color who has experienced her own set of

reasoned doubts at “staying Seen.” Seeing Bess is transactional, and remaining unseen in her

chamber is preferred. Thus, it is only fitting that Jack is revealed in these chambers, where

labor is divided strictly from desire, and Jack occupies a variety of positions that no client ever

could. At finally seeing Jack’s genitals, Bess is first struck with pure affirmation, stating “’Yes’ in

that inimitable fashion particular to women of a certain predilection,” referring “to what was

and was not there” (CF, 109, author’s emphases). The order here is not purely for the purposes

of poesy: “what was” does indeed triumph over what “was not,” and it takes all of the elements

of Bess’s own minoritarianism to apprehend what it is she is bearing witness to. Jack asks,

mirroring Voth’s own self-description, “do you think I’m a Monster?” Bess knows that either

assent or denial would ring equally hollow: “Well, you’re Something” (ibid). Jack is

(mis)recognized as the sum of his parts, including both his uniqueness and his

selfrepresentation; Bess never questioned his manliness for a moment, even as she marveled at

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the ways in which he defied previous, disappointed masculinities with which she interacts in

her work. Something is everything.

T Fleischmann makes an offhand comment regarding desire that helps further consider

the mutual (mis)recognition implicated in the love of Jack and Bess: “I’m interested only in

people with complicated genders” (TT, 69). Fleischmann has plenty of sex and perhaps is more

promiscuous in the objects of their lusts, but “interested” feels like the very highest value

bestowed upon another person. Bess, too, has no lack of suitors-for-pay, but interest—one

gets the sense from the manuscript that there have been no other “interests” before Jack. And

yet, the singularity of “chimera” Jack—not a Monster, but not not-a-Monster—is particularly

marked for a reflective and expert sex worker such as Bess. Fleischmann’s self-(mis)recognition

could be a self-revelation for Bess, and she would likely concur, too, that “empathy is a holy

power […] connects us beyond our physical form” (TT, 54). Jack does in fact need empathy in

this moment of nakedness, which Bess answers by giving his genitals many, loving names.16

She brings his form into the world through invented nomenclature, takes him back from the

vivisectors and eugenicists who seek to capture him through textbooks and experiments. Bess

will preempt their efforts by both deterritorializing Jack’s transness from science to desire, and

activating covert political resistance through direct action—blowing up their ships and perhaps

killing some of the Master’s familiars along the way.

But (mis)recognition operates dialectically in Confessions of the Fox, the relationship

between the protagonists developing from the nodules of shared minoritarian experience and

quite distinct AFAB experience at once. As the depth of their connection becomes clearer, the

16 Could use note from LB where Zelda gets her name at the end of the (alphabetical) novel

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manuscript attempts to classify what exactly unites the lovers: “There was an unheldness to

them both in the world […] a certain shared Aloneness. Some utter Bereftness—of kin, of

home—they recogniz’d in each other” (CF, 166). Is the opposite of disidentification truly

identification? If to identify is to see oneself in another, then the term is inapt in this

instance—something new, undiscovered is being read between the lovers. Everything that Jack

and Bess share, in the above formulation, is a negation—not a loss, not a deduction, but an

absence. This is the flavor of minoritarian (mis)recognition: an inversion of the Master’s values

and presence means a shared devaluation and absence.

The bifurcated nature of the narrative of Confessions of the Fox, however, leaves room

for a twinned (mis)recognition. Not only does Voth marvel at the Sheppard narrative shot

through with trans becoming, but he also disidentifies with the entire academic/archival

endeavor, and joins the reterritorialized Stretchers on their distant plane. In so doing, Voth

more and more forcefully entreats us, the reader, to political resistance and communitarian

protective action. He hopes his annotated edition will find hands as careful and caring as his

own found the manuscript: “Dear Reader, if you are you—the one I edited this for, the one I

stole this for—and if you cry a certain kind of tears […] you will find your way to us” (CF, n316).

Blind, hopeful (mis)recognition; Voth’s conditional certainty hinges on crying a certain kind of

tears, a nigh-on mystical emotional response to the narrative he has presented us. In his

narrative, (mis)recognition is indeed a specific genre of empathy, and minor literature finds

community in identifiers which perhaps require solicitation, certain kinds of tears.

In Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Paul cannot be (mis)recognized: he is pure

(mis)recognition in his ability to present precisely as he desires. The only moments of true

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recognition are when Diane discovers this ability of his, and when he meets another who

possesses it. But even these are false (mis)recognitions: the former does not change Paul’s

relationship as Polly with Diane, and the latter is so late in the narrative as to devalue any

explanation thereof—the novel, like so many others here, just ends. And yet, Paul can reflect

on (mis)recognition as he remains the same Paul even as others see and interact with him

variously. To offer a quick contrast: Annabelle, heroine of Tiny Pieces of Skull, muses on the

trauma and abuse of mirrors, until she builds her selfrepresentation up to the point where she

is beyond their reproach, noting “she hadn’t felt mirrors be horrid to her in ages” (TPS, 72), a

moment of triumph. Even after being subjected to sex work client-based violence and

attempted rape, her mirror “didn’t dare say a word out of turn” (TPS, 95), implying that it once

might have and might still. Paul, on the other hand, refers to “attention” as “a price you pay for

services, a currency,” and, opposite of an object that could offer discouraging words, “a mirror

held up to deflect” (PMG, 39). There is no (mis)recognition from the mirror when attention is

the currency; it simply deflects attention and, without question, attention is what Paul seeks

and exchanges in yet another instance of Lawlor’s novel’s exceptional status here.

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Chapter 6

Sex Work/Labor

Sex work has long been among the few forms of criminalized labor available to

marginalized subjects not only for survival or as a last resort—though it certainly can be those—

but also one which can be uniquely suited for a variety of reasons beyond conventional

employment discrimination. It is a highly-gendered array of trades, dominated by women and

femmes, similar to other forms of emotional labor, and also one which can equally confound

and reproduce class and race disparities. To whatever other extents minoritarian subjects

choose or are forced to pass, it is in the scope of waged employ that their minoritarian status is

often reified and reinforced—not least because nearly all of the trans and nonbinary characters

in the novels at hand are engaged in service industries, sex work, or both. Little Fish’s Sophie, in

all her sagacity, presents the other femmes with her “square of trans-girl careers,” a

purportedly exhaustive list of longer-term employment available to trans women—social work,

sex work, arts/academia, tech (LF, 241). It is hardly counterevidence for this schema that sex

work is the only one of the four in which main (and, often, secondary) characters engage in this

literature1; rather, it just demonstrates how the criminalized labor and attendant subject

position is far and away the one most available to young trans folks.

The fact of the matter is, sex worker and trans person are similarly polluted, debased,

and contested subject positions. They both challenge the hegemony of heteronormative,

amative coupling, and they both fly in the face of sex as a purely reproductive, rather than

1 To be fair, Annabelle does begin Tiny Pieces of Skull as a writer of fiction, but it is in small part due to career frustration that her underworld adventure, and sex work, in America commences.

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recreative or transactional, act. Even trans people in “straight,” monogamous relationships (of

which there are essentially none in the novels under consideration) de facto challenge gender

as a fixed, biological construct that collapses into sex, rather than the other way around, or in

some other geometry altogether. But sex work does not function as minoritarian labor just

because a subject is trans, queer, cash poor, or even woman/femme/feminized2. Instead, it

functions as a unique subjectifying machine in this minor literature, and one which deserves

further analyses as a deterritorialization of sex, a political revolutionary subversion, and a

communitarian reality. Sex work is a becoming-minor of a specific stripe, one which draws in

equal measure on history—in how it marks time and denudes progress—and identity—as it

establishes and reframes subject position as laborer. It is often a (transitory) placing of the

subject into the heteronormative landscape of desire: the clients tend to be “straight,” and sex

work is a transactional queerness, as if it “doesn’t count towards” being queer.

Furthermore, sex work may carry certain stigma from the phobic public spheres, but

how the minoritarian subject views the trades resists stigmatization’s effects via a spectrum of

tactics, from embrace to revolt. Respectability politics are especially dangerous in this venue,

as they require measuring which is “worse,” being trans or being someone who trades sex.

Perhaps as a result, these novels almost without fail treat sex work with deep commitments to

honesty and care. The honesty is notable in light of some of the concepts offered above in

terms of passing and authenticity, and what it means to be “forthright” to a Master which

demands a very specific and foreordained range of truths. The care is multifaceted as well:

2Not to conflate these three categories, but simply to note the feminized subject positions of many if not most sex working people.

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sometimes the sex is devalued and deromanticized to pure transactionality, other times it is

fulfilling or empowering, but at all times, the work is work—nothing less, nothing more.

Minoritarian subjects may be able to survive under the Master’s dictates, but if push comes to

shove, they will (attempt to survive) outside of them. Sex work in this minor literature is a

unique element of selfrepresentation, and a biographical border which is as surprising in its

relative prosaicness as it is consistent in its ubiquity.

Motivation, Violence, and Reality in Little Fish and Tiny Pieces of Skull

There are pivotal moments regarding sex work in both Plett’s and Kaveney’s novels:

each considers what it might mean to be a sex working person, woman, trans woman, and

other, more specific concerns regarding selfrepresentation. These are concerns that in

majoritarian literature would be strictly of motivation: why do sex work? But as Melissa Gira

Grant (2014) implores, this is always among the wrong questions to ask of a sex working person

(36). A much more informative question, and one that is addressed in a number of these novels

directly, is: why not do sex work? What are the social and cultural forces at hand that would

keep someone from seeking after this employ, particularly when other waged labor is

foreclosed or undesirable for more pressing and immediate reasons? When Wendy’s menial

retail job is set to be lost due to the store closing, her thoughts turn immediately to sex work,

and she sets to activating accounts with backpage.com3 and shemalecanada.com4 (LF, 130-

131). This instance lands at nearly the exact center of the novel, and is bookended by Wendy

3 Since raided and shut down, just before the passing of SESTA/FOSTA 4 Still active, likely due to the neoabolitionist legal framework around sex work in Canada, which allows for partial legalization of some of the trades.

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and others reflecting on sex working pasts and presents (never futures, no futures). But this

deterritorialization of emotional labor is forestalled, briefly, as Wendy waits to make live the

profiles that will almost immediately flood her with employ. She self-cautions: “Take a bit […]

who knows how long you get to not be a ho again” (ibid, author’s emphases). Why be a sex

worker? Multiple reasons, perhaps, but also not any more than most other jobs in late-stage

capitalism. Why not be a sex worker? For that, Wendy has specific answers. Wendy certainly

had a “bad date” past—just as we all have bad days at work, minus the specter of

criminalization that does not threaten most of us on even on our best work days: angry,

threatening, disrespectful assholes, timewasters5, fuckboys6 chasing freebies, but, crucially for

Wendy, “never anyone who actually laid hands on her" (LF, 120). She is neither rationalizing

nor equivocating her sex working past, simply noting that women deal with bad men in all sorts

of employ. It is further worth noting that she seems somewhat oblivious of her privilege (a

tough term to use, it would seem, but there are gradations and levels) as a white-presenting,

cis-passing femme in avoiding violence. She does note, though, that she did sex work to avoid

getting assaulted (LF, 91-92), implying that the transactionality and specificity of these

encounters in this work allowed her to live somewhat comfortably without putting herself in

even more compromised situations due to pervasive misogyny and transphobia. Sophie seems

to occupy some of the same categories as does Wendy, with the most decisive difference being

her lack of experience. While Wendy saw in-calls as the safest way of working, Sophie has,

prior to the action of the novel, done sex work (an out-call), only once (LF, 78). When Sophie

5 A specific category of abuse levied on predominately women and femmes in the service industry/emotional labor under the guise of “negotiation.” 6 Plett’s term, not mine, possibly derived as it is from prison parlance for an “owned” fellow inmate.

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begins “working-working” (ibid, 108) and immediately ends up with a bad trick, Wendy is put in

the difficult situation of minoritarian communitarian solidarity—she should encourage Sophie

to “get hers,” just as has Wendy—and concern for her friend’s stepping into a phobic private

sphere about which she knows little7. Behind closed motel room doors, Sophie is especially

vulnerable to the magnified aggressions about which she is so savvy outside. This lack of

experience is made more pronounced by a third one of the femmes, Carla, who marvels at the

sheer administrative realities of sex work as she accompanies Sophie on her hotel in-call

weekend (LF, 172). A variety of checks, both formal and informal, which seek to attenuate the

inherent risk of gender-based violence in out-call work. Soraya does not escape with her life in

an analogous experience in Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, though she “ignored her better

judgment” in taking the out-call which leads to her death (FF, 69). Sophie’s suicide is not

directly attributed to a bad client experience, but there is something palpable about this area of

her inexperience—not the sex, mind, but the work—that puts a finer point on this miserable

world and how the Master’s worst presumptions regarding minoritarian subjects are confirmed

in their self-erasure.

Still, Wendy does leave the trade in part because her (previous) neighbors consistently

threatened to call the cops—but there was always the option of out-calls, which will be her sole

7 This type of knowledge-making and -sharing cannot be overstated. I noted in identity formation the ways in which minoritarian subjects may or may not have access to narratives which help understand and interpret their experiences, should they seek these narratives. There is a tension between infantilizing those in earlier moments of transition, and wanting to provide communitarian support and encouragement. Sex work is not dissimilar in this way; there is “trans Twitter” and “sex work Twitter,” there were (and are) trans zines and self-produced media, just as there are for sex workers. The twain occasionally (and increasingly regularly, it would seem) in codified cultural institutions, such as MoMA PS1’s “homeroom” space, which can be viewed cynically under the mantles of “diversity” and “representation,” or as an extending of the horizon of minoritarian art as undeniable and immediate.

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mode in the future. The other reason, however, has no caveat: Wendy stopped doing sex work

because her surgery was over. This has double significance, part of which is noted above:

Wendy worked as a femme with a bio-penis, and that stopped being the case. The other

reason, the need for significant additional finance, is eclipsed. She deactivates her ads after

Sophie’s death (LF, 161), but it is a short-lived and ultimately incongruent act of mourning:

Wendy is beyond proficient at this work, and even her worst sex working moment feels less

dehumanizing than the paternal care that her retail boss displays in telling her she will lose a

wage that provides her less in a week than does sex work in a couple of hours.

Plett is devastatingly efficient at cycling through the triumphs and annoyances of sex

work in the cyber age, chronicling not a progression but a pervasion of sex working experiences

which enfold the other elements of Wendy’s life—spending time with her father, researching

her grandfather, attempting to support and be supported by the other femmes, and even a

romantic interest in Ernie. Sex work deterritorializes sex from amative/procreative relation and

reterritorializes it onto labor practice and power, and once Wendy has eclipsed her two

“waiting periods,” one after the initial restarting, the other after Sophie’s death, she navigates

her labor deftly. Her first gig back in the trades is an underpaid “cuddling” out-call (LF, 147)

bordering on time-wasting, but is followed with a text from the perfunctorily communicative

Ernie. Wendy muses, “should text him my fuckin rates” (LF, 148, author’s emphases),

reminding herself and the reader that the designation of “love interest” is only one tick away

“potential client.” It is only a cold statement to a subject who sees sex as the end-all be-all of

human relationships, which Wendy (and, for the matter, Sophie) does not.

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This first experience, marked by the annoyance of contact which is read as more

“intimate” due to its nonsexual nature, is in sharp contrast to the second call, at which Wendy

“blew him in minutes,” and was paid in full (LF, 148). This is clearly as close to an ideal as exists:

Wendy can move on to earning further, celebrating with drinks, or doing something else

altogether, unburdened by the lingering concern of what to do with the other fifty minutes of

her purchased time. Plett subtly reveals another truth of sex work for the minoritarian subject:

Wendy continues to (quite successfully) advertise on trans-specific sites, despite surgically and

hormonally aligning her physiognomy with her selfrepresentation of sex-gender as woman.

While obviously being good for business, this dissonance results in unnecessary reminders of

the seeming oddity of being a sex working trans woman with a vagina. One out-call marvels,

“it’s just amazing what they can do, like—take something out, put something else in” (LF, 194).

In one sense, as someone interested in Wendy only for her sex-gender, this client is the ideal

representative of a discreet phobic public sphere. He, as with all the clients Wendy sees, wants

to have sex with a trans woman, whether for the first time or the hundredth. This is likely the

sole purview of his experience with trans folks, and perhaps women in general. So his

obliteration of Wendy’s agency in her transition is especially marked: it is “they”—the medical

industrial complex—which “does” something in “making” Wendy. But not even making

“Wendy,” of course, as the client is speaking strictly of the vagina, even if his exclamation

clearly carries a supra-biological inflection. The vagina is a feat, worthy of amazement, and is

the result of the interchanging of (assumedly oppositional) sex organs—Wendy is an adjunct, at

most, to her sex-gender. But he is just a client, and barely that, as he will leave and there will

be another, so long as Wendy deigns there be one. She commands an endlessly-reproducible

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stable of paying men, her labor bordered and confined only so far as the ads are up and her

phone is on. The obverse of this client experience is the far out-of-town out-call, who expects

Wendy to have a bio-penis and is disappointed when she does not (LF, 211). Her first instinct is

telling: she wants to call Sophie, to both commiserate and get advice, despite knowing that

Sophie was no expert as worker. Sophie would not, of course, get Wendy out of this jam, but

would be clever and caring, would remind Wendy of her own skill and the absurdity of the

world in which her bio-penis-less-ness was suddenly a potential liability. But Wendy does what

women in emotional labor—and perhaps especially sex workers—are expected to do: dress-up

and tell stories. Wendy constructs a bottoming narrative for the cocaine-fueled military man,

experiencing his own avowed gender confusion and resulting fear. It is in part his desire for

Wendy’s absent penis that makes him worried about being “a faggot” (ibid), and her work

bleeds into trans communitarian protection as she consoles him in his egg-status. But the

solution to this puzzle is a combination of consolation, history, and prosthesis as Wendy fucks

the client with a champagne bottle as they watch a younger, bio-penis-possessing Wendy in

some of her online porn. It is full deterritorialization of cis-het penetrative sex, reterritorialized

as trans-becoming through sex work: a financially-compensated trans woman fucks a

provisionally cis man with a replacement (not fake, it is entirely real) phallus before returning to

her life, never to see him again. Wendy the sex worker is the/an answer to a swath of

questions regarding men’s intimacy, sexuality, and desire, and it is her view that illuminates the

dark, phobic public spheres of sex and gender. Her vagina is disembodied and marvelous for

one client, nonexistent for another, and representative of disappointment and loss for a third.

In a final iteration, Wendy has an out-call with a client who is a “top, but I like shemales, I

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dunno why” (LF, 281). Unwilling to speculate as to why, anyway, or not accepting the whys

when he does. But this client does exist after the session, bared before Wendy, who observes

he “looked childish and whimpering as he left” (ibid). He has not been defeated, nor even had

a “truer self” revealed in the encounter, but is simply worthless after the transaction is

complete—less than worthless, even, but erased. Sex work can reflect trans erasure back onto

clients, on whom the worker depends as a category, but not as individuals.

Compare this with Juliana Huxtable’s note that sex work is “the most ‘natural’ way for

someone like me to discover their sexuality” (MPG, 34). For all that Wendy discovers in the

above encounters, her sexuality seems fairly far afield. But Wendy is not “like” the Huxtable of

Mucus in My Pineal Gland, anyway, not least because she does have community and a social

circuit through which she can move with certain latitude, unlike Huxtable’s Southern rural and

online milieus. Annabelle, in Tiny Pieces of Skull, is perhaps somewhere in-between: both

London and Chicago of the 80s seem to have some space for trans women, but it must be found

or carved out. Much the same as in all of these novels, acceptance and toleration are not really

what’s being fought for; instead a life is sought in which one can develop into whatever it is

they turn out to be, relatively unperturbed and unmolested based on their becomings. Long

before the notion of sex work crosses the relatively straightlaced Annabelle’s field of

consideration, her great influence and (anti-)model, Natasha, refers to her as “a little whore-in-

training” (TPS, 16). What is notable about the “training” at hand is Annabelle’s skill at canny

negotiation on behalf of her new friend—not any particular instruction regarding the sex

element of sex work. But what these characters find again and again in their trading sex is that

the sex itself is the simplest (which is not always to say easiest) element of the labor. Early on

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in her sex working in Chicago, Annabelle discovers that “prostitution is just like school-

teaching” (TPS, 72),clearly not implying that school teachers draw on prurience and desire, but

rather that her sex work clients essentially require instruction, with all of the praise and

scolding that might go along with it. Minoritarian subjects in criminalized labor are able to

make out the contours and conditions of the labor far more adroitly than the censorious public

around them, and these contours rarely converge with said public’s imagination. Annabelle

ruminates further on the mundanity of the work: “the hardest things about the evil world of

sexual exploitation and degeneracy into which she seemed to have fallen was how bored you

always seemed to be while it was going on” (TPS, 114). This hard-boiled novel of manners holds

plenty of excitement for the reader, and its femmes experience the omnipresent threat of

violence from police, clients, and each other, but Annabelle is not delusional in claiming that

much of it is boring. It isn’t exciting to fight to keep one’s head above water beneath the sway

of the Master’s dictates and the aggression of the phobic public spheres which heed them. Sex

work is without question the most straightforward and perhaps even safest way for Annabelle,

Natasha, and other trans women to carve out and maintain space in the city. It is also the

source of a labor-based solidarity shared among the diffuse trans woman community in queer

Chicago, one which is generally little- or mis- understood by cis interlocutors.

Mark, the sometimes-lover who entwines himself in Annabelle’s story, and

Hennie, his cis sometimes-paramour, represent the interpersonal (as opposed to professional,

as in cops, bartenders, and clients) axes of cis-ness in Tiny Pieces of Skull. Mark has a bit of the

flavor of a rescuer, wondering why any of the women engage in the sex trades, incredulous to

the conditions that render this work the most immediately available and desirable. In the midst

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of a run of flummox regarding his relationships with both of the abovementioned women, he

asks if the sex work could possibly be “all just business, really?” (TPS, 132). The bourgeois

insecurity of the man caught in a “love triangle” entirely of his own making is refracted through

his anxiety around Annabelle’s employ and experience. The trans women have anxieties of

their own about Hennie’s eventual participation in their work, though as this is a novel of

manners, it takes a bit of time before fellow worker Carola finally asks Hennie about why she

involves herself in their sex working world. Carola notes, in her curiosity and skepticism, that

“we three,” meaning Annabelle, Natasha, and herself, “have the excuse that it’s often difficult

for people in our position to do much else” (TPS, 139). The novel is more or less a

demonstration of this point, and Hennie has another business in selling antiques, besides. She

seems prepared for this line of inquiry, though her first answers are somewhat mundane: “I

usually just tell people that it’s really not any of their business; or that whoring is a useful way

of not having to take out a bank loan every time I think I’ve spotted a piece worth having”

(ibid). Hennie has instrumentalized sex work, and that is nobody’s business but her own—fair

enough. But the twin anecdotes which follow, detailing her introduction into the sex trades,

are both absurd and representative of a certain gilded doorway into sex work which would

never have been available to the other three. Hennie’s first sex working experiences, according

to the highly efficient narrative she spins out, are unwitting encounters with foot fetishists,

twice in one day. The first is a soon-to-be client with whom she ends up trapped in an elevator.

He is struck with angina and she has, according to him, accidentally crushed his pill beneath the

shoes he has already admired in their informality. Though by the end of it she is “unsure of

what actually happened” (TPS, 140), the man has licked the pill from her shoe, paid her 100

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dollars, and ejaculated through his pants. Carola seems to accept this “accidental sex work”

narrative, but Hennie reminds her that the object of the story was a 200 dollar dress, towards

which she has only “earned” half the money. The concept of inadvertent labor is one perhaps

worth further speculation, but in this instance, it is simply a means to an end. Waiting at a train

platform to catch transit to a job interview, Hennie is encountered by a false official—fake

badge and all—who suggests that some Croatian terrorists have scattered plutonium over the

platform and he is concerned people may have tracked it around already. Out comes the

Geiger counter, and “suddenly he lowered his head, you know the rest” (ibid). She buys the

dress and gets the job due to the employer’s being impressed at her attire, naturally. Hennie

has deterritorialized the sex of sex work, rendering herself an almost entirely passive player in

the endeavor. Whereas Annabelle is a teacher and Natasha an actress, Hennie is a willing foot.

Her story would have sex work as an interesting digression—an excellent story for a gallery

opening or a cocktail party. To this end, Carola’s initial question is mooted: Hennie simply does

not participate in the same industry as do the other women.

So, what defines the work of sex work for the minoritarian subject: motivation, means,

result? Joey and Alexa exchange banter about the borderlines, the former labeling the latter a

“whore,” to which Alexa rejoins that Joey is too. Joey’s demurral is illustrative of a certain,

Hennie-esque, (non)distinction: “I’m just doing it for extra spending money” (S, 109). It is

actually a rather singular observation in this minor literature: the reasons for doing sex work (or

not doing sex work, really) are largely unaddressed in their prima facie clarity. Yet, T

Fleischmann reveals an odd anxiety about the seeming elision regarding sex work in their own

book: “Nearly everyone I know relies on sex work to pay their bills, to one degree or another,

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although I rarely mention this in my writing, and so my essays are filled with people who have

these lacunae in their lives, their behaviors and movements and circumstances seeming to lack

a certain context or motivation, and their labor erased” (TT, 109). This is ultimately a statement

concerned with Fleischmann’s audience much more than with their narratorial or editorial

practices. But it is also one which highly values prose and suggests that criminalized labor is

naturally underrepresented and hidden away—in a book which largely does not (so far as a

reader can easily tell) operate in pseudonyms or even heteronyms, the author protects the

income of their comrades precisely by not naming it. Furthermore, this is an exceedingly

common “lacuna”—not every story, even in a historical materialist framework, must focus on

the waged labor of its characters. But Fleischmann clearly worries that without naming the

labor of sex work, the people in their work lose context—fair enough—but also motivation.

This is an anxiety unique to conveying minoritarian experience, the experience of the

underclasses, those for whom motivation in work is simply survival, and—and this is my claim—

to name it constantly and consistently is almost redundant. The people Fleischmann knows are

independent, queer, trans, nonbinary, artists—they are absented from the phobic public

spheres and participate in criminalized labor not out of resistance or desire to be “sexual

warriors,” but to get by. Any lacking context or motivation that would be added by naming

their labor is almost certainly this, and yet the anxiety to name the absence is real and realized.

Even here, in its named-non-naming, the labor of sex work represents a marker of minoritarian

identity. Next, a turn to variations on this theme, to offer further notes on sex work as

(de)gendered labor of the minoritarian subject.

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Sex Work as (non)Identity

Maria Griffiths, in all her pith and theorizing of her own experiences, notes that one of

the very first “stereotypes around transsexual women” is “we’re all sex workers” (N, 61). As

with many of the broad proclamations in Nevada, there is a tension between the

communitarian experience bound up in the pronoun “we” and the subject of this

stereotyping—who assumes this? Irrespective of one’s position on either side of this tension,

the subject position of sex worker prevails: if everyone assumes trans women are sex workers,

then in a very real manner, it hardly matters whether they actually are or are not. The phobias

of the public spheres have little room for “verification” or verity at all. All necessary evidence is

in their beholding, and their confirmation bias is encouraged by the Master’s discourses of

heteronormativity and “Assigned at Birth,” medicalized sex-gender. Sex work is not a stand-in

for any kind of identity in this minor literature, but how it inflects on both the public beholder

and the private biographical borders of minoritarian subjects is a machine of deterritorialization

and revolutionary potential—a becoming-minor at the nexus of survival, sex, and sexuality.

Sex work takes on its most capacious range of significations in Confessions of the Fox,

perhaps even more so than a novel such as Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, with its Two-

Spirit, sex working protagonist. Jonny does think about his work a great deal, but for him it is a

craft and a consequence of unique abilities and talents. In Fox, Bess’s sex work is enfolded in

her revolutionary ideology and caste-destroying imagination. The narrator Voth sets the tone

for the treatment of sex work early on in the novel, when explains that “bat house” as a slang

for brothel is “not meant cruelly here, but is used in a loving and familiar manner, such as

would be exercised only by a member of the subculture to which it applies” (CF, 10). What

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stands out in this “loving and familiar” treatment of sex workers is branding them a

“subculture.” Voth certainly makes the case for a shared vocabulary and subcultural capital in

the queer London underground of the day—and there certainly is not see much in the way of

stigmatization within this undercommons—but the community developed between Jack, Bess,

and the others goes somewhat beyond subculture8 to mutual aid and non-identitarian

solidarity. Bess’s subject position as migrant, woman of color, sex worker is quite different

from Jack’s as escaped indentured servant, white-presenting man, thief: one need look no

further than their respective encounters with the state to see that. But while Bess is able to

operate unperturbed in her labor for the majority of the novel, Jack’s class position marks him

as a criminal even before he accepts the vocation of thief more formally. Sex work can navigate

through the phobic public spheres at this moment in time in a way that offenses against

property cannot. Still, there are limits to Bess’s motility, especially as the screws of policing and

borders tighten: the sentinels come to the bat house for “prohibited,” meaning foreign, sex

workers (CF, 145). One of Bess’s polluted subject positions overwhelms the other, and leaves

her with the choice to either flee or enact her revolutionary potential.

Rosenberg draws this imagined history through its antecedent reality, musing on “a

radical librarian subcommittee of STAR” (CF, 272), a reference to Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia

Rivera’s Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries formation in Manhattan’s East Village,

founded in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. Johnson and Rivera took a perspective

on their work to help house queer and trans youth as part of an international struggle for rights

and recognition, as well as an adjunct of broader revolutionary action. Both Rivera and Johnson

8 See for example Haenfler, 2014.

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were sex workers at various intervals, and their resistance is mirrored in other acts of sex

worker resistance such as the Lyon church occupation of 1975, which gave rise to International

Whores Day, not dissimilar to the Christopher Street Liberation Day’s leading to Pride Parades

internationally. None of these novels attempts to thread the needle from trans minoritarian

subject to sex worker to revolutionary per se, but the transgressed boundary between

recreational sex and sex-gender expression and identity is pronounced in a manner this study

holds is revolutionary. As Jack and Bess move towards founding the thieftopia, they seek to

bring “All the bats—not the Abbess!—but the rest of them” (CF, 314). There is no space for

masters or Master in thieftopic thinking, no exploitation of labor or hierarchy of command; sex

work does not disappear in thieftopia, but sexual employment does.

It should be noted that only Bess is under anyone else’s corporate employ in her sex

work in any of the minor literature at hand. The para-legal status of sex work in Fox’s pre-

Victorian England is distinct from any of the other contexts at hand. None of the women and

femmes engaging in the sex trades is ever in any real, direct danger from the law, but neither

do they suggest any protection from it in cases of potential harm or theft. In the City of Smoke

and Light of Fierce Femmes, the “First Femme” was “beaten to death by a would-be john in

front of a dozen bystanders” (FF, 38). There is equal protection under the law from neither the

state nor the (geographic) community at large for trans sex workers. But knowing this—and the

First Femme is literally idolized as a protective statue in the City—renders the peculiar

private/public fissure of sex work a navigable gauntlet for many of the minoritarian subjects of

this minor literature. Little Fish’s Wendy is awash in client requests as soon as she boots and

reboots her advertisements (LF, 231). Phone sex “resulted” for the fetishist, Krys, of The

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Masker, “in a closet foaming with ruffles” (M,17), and yet her internalized whorephobia9 is

nearly itself an element of a masochistic fetish: “you are officially a cum-eating whore […] this

man bought your slut mouth for the price of a dress” (M, 47). Completing the triangulation of

(non)identity, Krys seems proud as she notes that she has danced on web camera in a way

she’d never danced “in front of other people” but she knows “how to move for sex” (M, 62).

This rapid succession demonstrates a contouring of sex work’s role in becoming for the

minoritarian subject: first, Krys generates income and “success”—at least according to a

deformed accounting of the Master’s definition of the latter. Her subject position is read only

insofar as she lets on in advertising or the calls themselves, she is otherwise anonymous in

these transactions. In the second instance, Krys exhibits internalized whorephobia, conditioned

in part by phobic public conceptions of “cheapness” and “being bought.” Felix, in this instance,

the client, has obviously not bought anyone’s mouth, he has instead exchanged a material

object for Krys’s time and service; any interpretation further than that is socially conditioned,

and the reader is not given the distinct source of that conditioning. In the final observation,

Krys describes a particular skill or talent which exposes fissures in public/private and

pleasure/work binaries. Krys instrumentalizes her minoritarian status to her advantage, even

as her homosocial or amative relationships in the narrative are fraught, to say the least. As it

happens, none of the sex working characters other than Alexa in Sketchtasy seems to have

much sex outside of work, save for the odd encounter here and there. Sex work ends up

enveloping a majority of the sexual contact which makes it to the page in this literature, and so

9 See Sumaq (2016), Jeffreys (2018).

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registers as definitive in another way. Krys’s triangle—money-whorephobia-skill—is a conduit

through (or perhaps circumnavigating of) phobic public spheres.

Alexa jumps the middle term of Krys’s arc, as there is little reservation regarding her

status as sex worker. If she has experienced any intervals of uncertainty or pause, they predate

the narrative of Sketchtasy, and there is perhaps the most pronounced sense in any of this

minor literature of an active sex life alongside a routine sex working life. Alexa harbors no

bourgeois sense of shame, and is willing to “do a lot” for “tricks,” right up to telling them she

loves them: “that’s just demeaning” (S, 53). This is an expression of the inverse of

whorephobia, a recognition of the identitarian bounds of one’s sex working personae, and

willingness to abide self-asserted limits. It’s not a value judgement, mind, as minoritarian

subjects accounting for their own experiences is decisive in the crafting of a minor literature,

but it is representative of the end limits of sex work in determining or reflecting identitarian

concerns. To tabulate the variations: Annabelle and Wendy work because they know how, Krys

works despite a mixture of desire and self-derision, Alexa works because it is easy.

What makes it easy, though, is in part Alexa’s (learned, finely honed, heavily self-

medicated) ability to engage with the majoritarian public that purchases her services10. She

recognizes the bifurcation of her identity: “I put on some tragic outfit to disguise my glamour,”

as she heads out to the stroll, “because I might as well work the block too and we all know

tricks don’t like glamour” (S, 44). Whether we all know that or not, it is true because Alexa says

10 In an earlier volume of sex worker writing, Sycamore (2000) notes that “every trick is just desperate to become a story” (2). Sycamore’s own skill as a worker/writer seems conditioned by a narrative dialectic between the storytelling of sex work and the emotional labor of storytelling. She writes about sex worker storytelling as “sex workers taking charge of the scrutiny” (3) which is requisite for their developing “a unique way of looking at the world, a critical distance that can’t be imitated” (ibid). This is a vein for another book, but in some ways I hope this chapter advances a serious consideration of minoritarian sex worker (anti)epistemology.

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it is true and believes it to be true. Tricks cannot read Alexa in her glamour, and she

understands the market and her competition—unlike the narrative Joey has spun for

themselves—“just for spending money”—Alexa’s is one of survival, paying rent, and staying

glamourous. The tricks themselves vary, a bit, but the work is at best mildly pleasurable, and

hardly an end itself. Still, Alexa’s wit regarding sex work as Profession is sharp, as she entreats

the reader “don’t call me ho, I prefer hooker” (S, 262)—an echo back to Morgan M Page’s

having “earned every syllable” of “transsexual.”11 It is not that any of these minoritarian

subjects is particularly protective of sex work12—the idea of advocating on behalf of their own

labor rights and recognition is so deeply secondary to individual and communitarian survival—

but the background understanding that were this work not available, things would be suddenly

far direr, is palpable. Alexa is confounded by the presence of an erection during a session,

“even though when I look at his face in this light I can only really think about death” (S, 47).

This is not an indictment of either the work or the client, simply an observation about the

proximity of sex (work) and death—though perhaps this is true of any work and death for the

minoritarian subject, whose precarity under capitalism is elemental to the persistence of the

latter. L.H. Stallings writes of the “antiviolence appeal of sex work,” which seems as in-line with

the experience of Annabelle in the Chicago queer scene as Alexa on the stroll in Boston:

“women fuck so that they do not have to kill” (Funk the Erotic, 161). The revolutionary appeal

(in both senses—attraction, and entreaty/demand) of sex work for the minoritarian subject is in

no small part that it keeps them alive and off the grid, slightly freer to exercise their resistance

11 See above, under Of What Territory and the Circuitry of De/reterritorialization 12 Though again, Sycamore the worker/writer most avowedly is.

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to, rejection of, or abstention from the Master’s dictates regarding sex-gender,

selfrepresentation, and biographical borders.

The Non-Workers

The market for sex work looms at the margins in nearly all of this minor literature. On

the one hand, sex work could almost not be further from the main narrative of Jia Qing Wilson-

Yang’s Small Beauty, its trans woman protagonist, Mei, who is seeking after place and

community after having been doubly divorced from family by the deaths of her mother and

cousin. But her closest friend, Annette, is a sex worker and tells Mei of “Her clients, her dates.

Good ones and bad” (SB, 7), and texts her about the “new client who wanted to spend a week

with her at a downtown hotel” (SB, 13). Annette is a stand-in for trans femme sex positivity,

but she is also a counterinstance to Mei’s own asexual presentation in the novel. Nevertheless,

Annette is marginal in this slice of Mei’s life narrative, perhaps suggestive of another path not

taken, and Mei of course refuses Annette’s invitation to come along on a potential working

date (SB, 65). Mei is nearly killed as a result of someone wanting to fuck, and so does neither—

fucks nor kills—in the course of the novel.

The market for sex work looms in Fierce Femmes as well, though the narrator herself

never engages in the trades. She is literally too busy killing to fuck, at least until the end of the

novel. Nevertheless, the Femme Alliance Building in the City is for “trans women and sex

workers” (FF, 50), aligning these subject positions in mutual aid solidarity. M. Jacqui Alexander

cites “the eroticization of the dissolution of the nation” (Pedagogies of Crossing, 53) in

prostitute and queer bodies, and Thom’s Street of Miracles is very much a nation-in-dissolve.

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The magic of Thom’s realism is found in femme solidarity, and that communitarian protection

very much centers sex workers. Even as Alzena the Witch doesn’t “take clients in sleazy

hotels,” she can tell you “if you’re about to make a bunch of cash on a date” (FF, 134). The

labor of full-service, independent sex work includes a tenuous/precarious balance of demand

and market autonomy, whether criminalized or partially legalized.

While Wendy seems to have a clear handle on her own sex work in Little Fish, navigating

as she does even a potential nightmare scenario, stranded miles from civilization after a date,

the people around her relate to the work variously. Though Sophie has limited experience in

the trades, she does theorize about the annual sex work freeze in January and February: “No

one makes a New Year’s resolution to see more prostitutes” (LF, 282). The market wanes, and

the most marginalized/minoritized feel the squeeze. Wendy’s chosen family speculate on the

sex work component of Sophie’s trans woman career square, and though it is somewhat ever-

present, Wendy wrings her hands a bit having to tell Raina that “I’m ho’ing again,” though

qualifies this necessity, “if she hasn’t figured it out already” (LF, 285). Sex work is neither

identifier nor identification, it persists as a set of trades exceptionalized in their marginalization

and criminalization, patronized exclusively (in these novels) by cis men, and thus a thinned

(worn?) membrane between the interior and exterior of the phobic public spheres. Webcams

from bedrooms, outcalls in hotels, dates in bars, quickies in cars—the public and private

muddle and invert, and the Master’s only form of market regulation is the threat of the

intervention of the violence workers of the state. As Maria Griffiths noted, the Master makes

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sex workers of many trans subjects, and cares not whether they actually participate in the

labor.13

Transformation and Countersexuality in Jonny Appleseed’s Sexual Labor

Sex work challenges the Master’s discourse on perspective as it deterritorializes labor

and desire in Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed. Jonny’s sex working experiences sit

uneasily at the disjunct between the viewpoint of the client and his own. In a representative

instance of this coupling, Jonny details the “ugly memories” that playing “a barely legal twink

for clients dredge up” (JA, 25) while concluding that “I have so much power when I transform”

(JA, 26). It is not solely a complication of sex work for an “urban NDN Two-Spirit femmeboy”

(JA, 45) moving through life off the reservation, though there is plenty of consideration of race

(and gender) fetishization in the novel. Rather, it is the kind of sex—and with whom they think

they are having it—that clients want, being put at odds with the work, at which Jonny is so

clearly adept. Sex work is Jonny’s superpower and his conduit to genderfuck characteristics; his

Kokum14 understands the latter even as she may never know of the former. Jonny recalls her

telling him, whether as a comfort or not, “you girl and you boy and that’s fine with me” (JA, 63).

Later, after Kokum has died, he asks himself the wrong question about the extent to which she

would understand his sex work, wondering “What would she have said if she’d known I got

naked on webcams and rubbed myself raw for a few measly bucks?” (JA, 213). Jonny’s Kokum

may very well have had opinions about this labor, but the question itself is conditioned by

13 For an earlier instance of historical solidarity and the assumption of the subject position of sex worker, see Joan Nestle “Lesbian and Prostitutes: A Historical Sisterhood” in Bell (1987). 14 Jonny’s mother’s mother

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phobias which are not Jonny’s own. The version of the question to ask might be, “what would

she have said if we discussed my transformational powers, and how they allowed me to extract

wealth from non-indigenous men?” Kokum’s comprehension of Jonny’s labor power as

decolonizing both sex-gender and tribal lands might at least offer her clearer grounds on which

to opine.

This power is woven through the text, but it is most clearly pronounced in Jonny’s sex

work, and nearly absent in Jonny’s amative relationship with Tias. The only jealousy Jonny

experiences in this latter relationship is when Tias takes up with a beautiful “NDN” woman from

his res. Jonny gazes at a photograph of her, his impression turning from longing to certainty: “I

could be that. I thought.” (JA, 116, author’s emphases), and he thinks that because he has been

versions of that. But Jonny continues, closing the loop between desire (both for Tias and to

transform into a beautiful woman), identity, and market: “From here on I’ll charge an extra

buck per hour” (ibid). This last note is either symbolic, comical, or both: an extra buck is

hyperbolically out of step with any adjustment in prices for the kind of work Jonny is doing, on

webcam, via phone, or in person. But to read the statement a bit more precisely, the surcharge

is warranted simply because Jonny “could be that,” not because he actually would. To view this

photo, think about its subject’s effect on Tias, and recognize one’s own potential in it is a trans

becoming reinforced by sexual labor. Jonny is expanded by each experience of potential sex-

gender transformation, and at this one, “my mind was becoming a funhouse of femininity”

(ibid).

At a certain point, Jonny is sufficiently expansive so as to draw his mother into the

funhouse as the two of them get made up for Kokum’s funeral, as he exclaims to her “we’re

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serving fish!” (JA, 201). Though mother does not understand the slang, the reader follows not

only the solidarity but the (dis)identification Jonny experiences with the strong women around

him. Jonny’s sexual labor has provided him with lessons to navigate both his own

selfrepresentations and his biographical borders as regard his family. The significance of actual

borders should not be lost here either: a big chunk of the narrative is concerned with the

amount of sexual labor Jonny will need to perform to get out of the city and back to the res.

Jonny thinks about his limits as laborer, but he never questions his capability to raise the funds

to get home. He sex works his way back to his (presumably cis) mother, and then includes her

in “fish” solidarity, deterritorializing sex-gender as situational and elective, and, most

importantly, communitarian.

Whether in the funhouse of femininity or not, Jonny’s most pointed sex working

experiences are out calls, measuring and negotiating his body against those of men with whom

he’s generally developed an online or phone-based relationship in the preceding days or weeks.

Jonny’s full-service sex work is built on these kinds of relationships, likely primarily as vetting

and to draw out some income before the potentially larger (and, generally, singular) payout.

Two of these encounters with clients further illustrate the dialectic of imagination, teaching,

desire, and market that underpin Jonny Appleseed’s trans becomings and minor literary

mechanics. In the first, Jonny is struck by a client’s bodily appraisal: “I thought you’d be

skinnier” (JA, 154). Though he is clearly stung at this failed expectation, Jonny is finished with

the work, and could forget the client the moment he walks out with payment. Instead, he

reflects on the client’s dismay with the following mode of defense: “I may not have the best

body but I do have a body,” neither of which seemed to be particularly in question, but then,

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“—and it’s a body that deserves to be touched and loved and owned, annit?” (JA, 154). The

body’s deserving of these things is based simply on its being, or being had. The trio of

characteristics Jonny’s body deserves are cast in sharper relief on the heels of a sex working

experience—touched? Certainly. Loved? Arguably, though the meaning of that term is not

just in the eye of the beholder, but the beheld as well. Owned? Certainly not, neither by any

client or even Jonny himself. The body as suggested here cannot itself be transacted, Jonny

cannot sell it, it does not leave him before, during, or after sexual labor any more than it does

during his emotional labor with Tias. Thus, it is aporetic to answer whether Jonny’s body

deserves to be owned. More interesting is to wonder at why it being not as skinny as a client

thought prompts needing to assert its deserving.

The second experience is, like the first, conditioned somewhat by market. The previous

client disclaiming Jonny’s morphology after the work is over is like eating an entire meal and

then musing that you thought it’d be saltier. It is a vapid ejaculation that is most easily read as

hurting-another-to-make-oneself-feel-better or misogynistic “negging” as a form of flirtation.

This second client is far more sycophantic, perhaps surprising himself that he is about to engage

in penetrative sex with a person who has a bio-penis. In one of their chats prior to meeting, the

client asks Jonny if sex hurts, to which Jonny, in his professionalism, suggests it does not. But

Jonny again shares with the reader his “true” reaction: “It doesn’t hurt as much as the rest does,

I wanted to say, but I closed the chat prematurely” (JA, 188-189, author’s emphasis). The

censored message does not go out for multiple reasons: as regards market, it would be an a

best strange and at worst self-defeating response. The client clearly needs reassurance in order

to proceed with the transaction. But it is also is somewhat a non sequitur, drawing as it does an

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irrelevant comparison between the act of penetrative intercourse and the rather vague “the

rest.” Sex work is, more often than not, marked by the absence of “the rest,” extracting as it

does the remainder, outside of what Elizabeth Bernstein (2008) terms the “bounded

authenticity”—one might equally say “bounded intimacy”—of the sex trades (6). Jonny

sometimes sells the illusion of “the rest,” but it would be professionally irresponsible and

potentially personally dangerous to open himself to the hurt of “the rest.” The choice of the

term “prematurely” is notable as well; anything premature in sex work carries with it the

double edge of either time to fill in order to make the session fill a negotiated duration, or the

potential for more efficient income, if the negotiation is for the act alone. This “premature”

forecloses a revelation which is perhaps worth more than Jonny could charge over a text

message with a client with whom he prepares for sex.

Upon finally meeting in person, Jonny is faced with an unprecedented request for a

session: to top for the client. This somewhat explains the line of inquiry about whether and

how much sex hurts, but Jonny is struck by the reterritorialization of gender onto his AMAB

body: “This is it?” he wonders, at being a Two-Spirit sex worker asked to operate his body

according to a hetero/homonormative mechanics, “All of this is the power of men?” (JA, 190,

author’s emphases). Jonny’s queries are not purely rhetorical—nothing is purely rhetorical in

minor literature, and least of all when it comes to sex work. There is no metaphor here, either:

Jonny actually wonders if he is experiencing the power of men. The phrasing is telling, though;

an attenuation of assumed power through communitarian disidentification with men-ness. The

first question is unsurprising, predictable: Jonny gains nothing additional through topping this

unpracticed cub, the money will be the same, and Jonny will leave unchanged (whether the

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same can be said for the client is completely immaterial to the worker’s experience). Of course

“this is it,” though what it is for Jonny the worker is experiencing the sanitized/masculinized

version of penetrative homosexual intercourse—most of his clients are “straight,” and Jonny as

an attractive, femme-on-demand bottom represents a momentary sojourn from his client’s

heteronormative sexual lives (or lack thereof). But Jonny the teacher-as-top is another matter,

and while there’s no grand revelation for the compensated top, there is also no novel or

enlightening connection made manifest by the presence of the paying bottom. The second

question, though, is a (market-driven/resistant) triangulation of deterritorialization, political

potential, and communitarian disidentity. To instead ask “is this the power of men?” would be

the homonormative, rhetorical version of the question: it would imply that there is some

cynical, or at least skeptical, doubt as to whether being the one doing the fucking is in fact

equivalent to having the power. It is an unnecessary question on two levels: Jonny holds the

experiential foreknowledge and will leave with the money. There is no need to ask it this way.

The next iteration might be: “this is the power of men?”, a weaker, less expansive variation on

the actual question. The emphasis becomes pronominal, expressing tragic realization and

recognition (not, crucially, (mis)recognition) that “this” in fact is a dominant figure of the power

of men, the power to fuck, and the possibility of being killed.15 It is an impotent and spent

“this,” and Jonny is in no position to agree or disagree: the Master doesn’t care about this

question of Jonny’s, and nothing will change for asking it. But the actual question is a

grammatical quagmire: “all of this” is initially unclear in its reference. It implies that perhaps

“some of this” ought not to be the power of men, or that even with “all” of it, something seems

15 See Stallings’ (2016) note above on the antiviolence of sex work.

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to be insufficient. Jonny has distilled and deterritorialized the experience of topping, of “being

the man,” in the context of a bounded transaction after which Jonny can go back to being

whatever he is/wants to be. “All of this” includes being the teacher, the object of market

satisfaction and desire, the “stamp of validation” for “Indian” fetishists (JA, 18), and the

operator of a bio-penis.

This deterritorialization of “the power of man” can be fruitfully coded as an instance of

Paul B. Preciado’s (2018) “dildonics,” an instantiation of his concept of countersexuality.

Countersexuality is predicated on the concept that sexuality—not necessarily “sex”—is

irreducible to gender, “a political and yet sometimes unconscious aesthetics of the body and its

pleasure” (8). Jonny experiences countersexuality, “an attempt to become foreign to your own

sexuality and to lose yourself in sexual translation” (ibid). He is indeed lost in this translation

and the political aesthetics of experiencing a surrogate version of the power of men through

survival sex work, and in particular, through this seminal request to top. Preciado uses

dildonics to consider not just the synthetic nature of the concept of the phallus, but the organic

nature of the concept of prosthesis. He writes, “Countersexuality says: the logic of

heterosexuality is the logic of the dildo, invoking the transcendental possibility of giving an

arbitrary organ the power to install sexual and gender difference” (Countersexual Manifesto,

65). Indeed, the bio-penis could not, in various senses, be more arbitrary for the Two-Spirit

Jonny, and Preciado offers this formulation of how that arbitrariness is revolutionary potential:

extracting the penis from sex-gender and calling it a dildo is a “decisive political act in the

deconstruction of heterosexuality” (ibid). Jonny understands that “all of this” is still not

enough, it does not begin to measure up to his own power, which expands across

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communitarian experience in a measure of true intersectionality. There is a territory in Peguis

culture for Jonny’s sex-gender selfrepresentation, but it is one he must map nearly alone,

deterritorializing the examples and instruction of the (mostly) women in his life to better decide

how to exist in the larger world around him. In this sex work encounter and others, Jonny does

not represent or stand in for anyone/anything, but experiences the (mis)recognition of bio-

penis as identifier of sex-gender. Sex work offers Jonny, wittingly or not, the platform from

which to enact Preciado’s “decisive political act,” which is, ultimately, a revolutionary one—it

contributes to the deconstruction of heterosexuality (and, for that matter, homosexuality) as

well as cis-normativity, as Jonny’s work and life exposes just how little and how much “all of

this” might/ought to be.

Preciado refers to the processes of naturalization and materialization of power relations

as “prosthetic production of gender” (Countersexual Manifesto, 129), relying on Foucault’s

capacious definition and use of “technology.” Under this conception, sex and gender are

“technologies of the soul and body” (ibid, 126). But Jonny’s sex working experiences of

countersexuality—“the right to live and fuck in an anatomical-political order that exists outside

of heteronormativity” (ibid, 111)—expose the technologies of power for what he is or, in a

revolutionary sense, could be. “All of this” is an indictment of the power of man, and Jonny’s

sex work does indeed keep him from killing. Preciado has one final, provocative formulation

that weaves together the (anti-)violence politics of sex work and the work of sex: “there is no

sex without separation, segregation, partition. Sex making = sex killing. Biopolitics =

necropolitics” (ibid, 108). Sex work formalizes this cut, then sutures it together under limited,

contractual, bounded intimacies. Minoritarian subjects know this separation particularly

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intimately themselves, finding or being found by the valences and contours of the phobic public

spheres.

Paul the Non-Worker

Paul, as has been noted, has no designs on sex work, despite his rather persistent

poverty throughout the novel. Paul, as has also been questioned, is not transgender in any

“realistic” or “consistent” sense of the term. In ways similar to those which Paul plays with

gender and expectations thereof, he also prods at the margins of the sex trades, though never

formally or informally trading sex directly. His initial demurral is at least halfway logical, as he

recognizes that he is “too lazy and willful for prostitution” (PMG, 231)—certainly his brand of

ennui could render the work more difficult. But this note regarding willfulness carries with it

some interesting potential implications, a bad reterritorialization of the work of sex work

steeped in whorephobic presumptions about labor in the sex trades. The open question here

mirrors the challenge that Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl presents to this study as a

whole: what is the opposite of willful, in this context? Would Paul be better suited for sex work

were he more docile, acquiescent, thoughtful? What sex work might represent, in its absence

in Paul’s existence, may say something broader about how transness does (not) present itself to

him.

Paul does, however, experience moments of contact with, and embodiment around, sex

work. A romantic interest, Franky, “pals around” (PMG, 260) with the Lusty Lady workers,

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another of Lawlor’s winking references to signal moments in sexual minoritarian history.16 As

his San Francisco adventure continues, “the sex workers flicking their long nails on the corner”

(PMG, 276) are part of the life-giving air that makes Paul think “maybe things were going to be

okay” (ibid). The workers are part of Paul’s scenery, yes, but they also reflect a sense of “being

okay” after which Paul seeks in the Bay. But there is a deeper level of identification with sex

work as Paul considers the instrumentality of his unique ability. “Paul the temple prostitute

took pleasure in satisfying others’ unspoken, even unknown, needs” (PMG, 244), he muses, and

this seems apt all around. He guesses correctly with a phenomenal success rate how he ought

to look and even when he ought to do to satisfy others. There are multiple encounters in which

the “unknown” component is satisfied as well; Paul’s ability to engage directly with his public

and slip between their phobias is perhaps the most remarkable element of his fungible sex. It is

more than fancy when Paul goes on, “He was a healer today. Most days. He was like Annie

Sprinkle, he thought, a sex priestess” (PMG, 245). He may feel all of those ways, but the

distinction between Paul and Annie Sprinkle is decisive: she does not heal or practice her sexual

arts for free. Sprinkle has contributed to advancing the struggle for sex workers’ rights, and

forcing a place at the academic and aesthetic tables for feminist sex workers—she is nothing if

not willful. Dr. Sprinkle has also theorized queerness and her own multiple comings-out (as sex

worker, as queer, as straight<!>) in ways nearly as myriad as Paul’s ability to transform, each

limited only by their imaginations. But Paul is promiscuous, more so than any other character

16 The Lusty Lady adult theater in San Francisco is famously the first such business whose workers formed a closed shop union, in 1997. Their struggle for workers’ rights has inspired many in the international sex worker rights movement, and the unionization efforts have been well-documented in the ensuing years.

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in this minor literature, and Paul cannot abide the concept of selling or trading sex. Annie

Sprinkle, he is not.

The closest Paul gets to sex work, at least in his own mind, is in a gay leather bar in

Chicago, in which his “chicken” status is an unshakeable identity, until he lets his penis grow so

large in his pants as to become irresistible. Yet this experience is Paul bottoming for the

formerly dismissive bartender, who is also sufficiently well-endowed to cause Paul to wonder if

he should physically alter himself to make the sex less painful. But, in a clever double-meaning,

Paul elects to experience the intercourse as it is, as he “wanted this feeling of being rent”

(PMG, 59). The linguistic sleight of hand is a conduit between rent as the past tense of “rend,”

as Paul experiences a (chosen) limit on his bottoming, and “being rent” as having gay sex for

money. But just as he is not Annie Sprinkle, Paul is no rent boy, he didn’t even get his beer for

free, and this very public sex takes on a different hue if it is a remunerated exchange. This

feeling may, again, be as close as Paul gets to the sex trades, but he offers a final dismissal on

grounds almost opposite to those from earlier in the text: Paul cannot sex work because “he

couldn’t make himself excited about sex without conquest” (PMG, 302). Paul has a good deal

of sex in the novel, both within the boundaries of amative relationships and recreational one-

offs, but any conquest is based in no small part on his shapeshifting. In more instances than the

one above, Paul turns a lack of interest into (sometimes violent) sexual connections. But

beyond questioning the extent of his own conquesting, it is worth further interrogating what

Paul assumes regarding the labor of sex work, and how one participates in it. Whether a given

worker feels a sense of “conquest” in their work, either as a means of staying alive, a way to

subvert market capitalism, a preservation of anonymity in the face of the phobic state sphere

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regarding felon, undocumented, queer, trans, or other polluted status, or simply the feeling of

extracting wealth from those who have it, is somewhat beside the point. More noteworthy

here is Paul’s assumption that he would have to be excited about sex to be a sex worker—an

assumption conditioned by the Master’s formal and informal banning of sex outside

matrimonial, reproductive, or at least amatively coupled bonds. In a certain sense, the

moments around sex work and criminalized labor are those which most challenge and

complicate Paul’s place in this minor literature.

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Outro

Detransition, Baby and Reterritorialization

Torrey Peters’ (2021) full-length novel debut seems to announce its foci in its two-word

title: the logic, process, and consequences of sex-gender detransition, and the desire,

symbolism, and politics of producing and rearing a child. But in its minor literary manner, there

is no child, and there is no narrative—explanatory, emotional, or expository—of detransition.

Instead, though hardly in substitute, Peters’ novel is bookended by what her protagonist,

Reese, describes as the trans woman version of the “Sex in the City problem.” By the end of the

text, Reese’s former paramour and potential surrogate co-parent Ames’s detransition is still

very real, but the baby remains somewhat of a fiction. Reconciliation between the two of them

and the third co-parent, Katrina, still currently carrying her and Ames’s fetus, is at best in

question—as is typical of trans minor literature, this central conflict will not be resolved in the

final denouement, and there is no reason to presume it would be in a nonexistent epilogue.

Still, Ames notes “this” (DB, 337)—sipping tea in an apartment with Katrina and Reese, abortion

looming as a likelihood—might be the solution to the Sex and the City problem, leaving the

reader to their own devices as to what “this” is. The concept itself harkens back somewhat to

the geometry of Casey Plett’s trans girl career square in Little Fish, but rather than the four

paths to making income available to trans women, in this “problem,” women in the American

television program of the same name must either find a partner, have a career, have a baby, or

produce art/writing (DB, 9). Reese notes that the first three of these have traditionally been

barred options for trans women, and as for the fourth, “no one wanted art in which she spoke

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for herself” (DB, 9-10). Of course, Peters herself appears to have “achieved” the partner (as

least judging by the dedications in the novel), and writes of the problem in the midst of a debut

novel for a “Big 5” publisher in which she presumably is speaking for herself. But this is in part

the authotheoretical trap, into which minor literature baits its readership: biographism and the

assumption that minor novels are written strictly for, from, and representative of their

constituent communities. The minor literary machine of this study has attempted to show,

instead, that through its various deterritorializations, minor novels are political and

(de)politicizing, and that their various flights from content to expression are enunciations of

communitarian value and revolutionary promise. It is thus a particular kind of provocation,

rather than defeatism, when Reese notes the traditional response to the problem: “And so,

trans women defaulted to a kind of No Futurism” (DB, 10). This refusal, set in the past tense

“defaulted,” incites the grand deterritorializations of the novel: of time, of family, of romance

and love, and, of course, of parentage and the child (as well as The Child).

Up to this point, this study has paid little lip service to majoritarian readings of the

novels it proposes as minor, save for an attempt near the onset to position the works according

to accepted and legible genres and subgenres of fiction. To understand the deterritorializations

and reterritorializations of Detransition, Baby, however, it is useful to consider “dust jacket”

readings of its overarching themes and the ways in which it refuses to answer questions on the

Master’s terms. It is not a novel designed to “familiarize” minoritarian subjects, nor one of

territorial assimilation through a narrative legible to phobic publics. The dust jacket might

propose that Peters’ novel is about who is allowed to be a parent, and why. What kinds of

justifications are necessary for non-hetero/homonormative parentage, and to whom must they

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be justified. This would be the kind of “great and established” story that ends in triumph,

resolve, or tragedy, none of which necessarily or fully describes the work at hand. In fact, a

majoritarian novel that covered the above landscape would likely be written from the ending

backwards, advancing the narrative with or against the discontents of detransition and the

obstacles faced by not only unmarried, but not even romantically-bonded people seeking to

raise a child. Though the territory of Peters’ novel is adjacent to some of these concerns,

Detransition, Baby is minor in that it refuses definitive answers or even reasoned speculation as

to why these would be the most important for it to render in long-form fiction.

On another front, the novel might be expected to function as a kind of conduct manual

or even ethnography, speculating upon how trans women are supposed to behave, and of what

they are permitted to dream. This would be the minoritizing reading, considering any text by or

about minoritarian subjects as necessarily concerned with minority: justifying and rationalizing

behavior and offering a glimpse, through the use of a great and established medium such as the

novel, of a social universe otherwise inaccessible or undesirable to phobic reading publics.

Peters interlaces the narrative with quips about queer and trans communities and archetypes in

Brooklyn, perhaps winking to her own community even as she invites her reader into each

reservation and vicissitude of the oddness of what is being proposed and why. Even as the

deterritorializations of motherhood and parentage more broadly are clear, the novel does not

kowtow to relaying insight strictly in the Master’s language.

Finally, at the most “aware” end of the spectrum, Detransition, Baby could be proposed

as a demystification of, and meditation on, the presumptive taboo of detransition. In this

reading, the novel is aware of the ways in which this decision plays into the hands of TERFs and

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evangelicals alike, but tries to “humanize” or even “naturalize” the set of decisions and

consequences as simply symptomatic of a further destabilization of sex-gender as binarized,

fixed, and systematizing. This would be the Master’s allowance for a reparative reading,

appearing to make space for a minority territory while writing it off as singular and non-

threatening: repeatedly asserting non-binarism is reterritorialized as signifying the strength of

the binary to begin with. This “aware” reading wonders about the strength of the residue of

queerness that hangs on the detransitioned subject, and is justified by Reese, Ames, and

Katrina’s own musings on who is queer, how queer they are, and how they are queer.

Trans minor literature enunciates in its own languages, often baiting readers into the

kind of dust jacket readings rehearsed above. It is doubtless a strength of Peters’ recent work,

and perhaps even part of the reason for its more “popular” success, that such readings are

available and, for want of a better term, satisfying. A minor literary reading is neither

necessarily deeper nor more informed in any quantifiable way. But the deterritorializations of

the novel are myriad, working on, against, and through the Master’s language, and accounting

for some of them here constitutes an excellent case study in resistance and minoritarian taking

flight. This is an opportunity to read the three categories of the study perhaps more

synthetically, as time, identity, and labor are coextensive and coinfluential categories in minor

literature.

Parentage/Pregnancy

A not insignificant element of this study has been considerations of genre; how can or

must minor literature deterritorialize generic conventions to fulfill its communitarian promise

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and revolutionary political potential? Detransition, Baby hails the broad categories of family

and courtship novels, but expresses each genre through its characters’ re-narrativization of

their experiences. As with the other novels in this study, Peters’ work does not closely,

biographically, trace transition narratives for its trans protagonists, Reese and Amy, nor does it

particularly follow a detransition narrative for Ames. Similarly, the reader is given only

vignette-length gasps of the trajectory of Amy and Reese’s relationship, and equally

perfunctory—albeit affecting—snapshots of each combination within the triangle: Katrina and

Ames’s courtship and coupling, Ames and Reese’s reunion, Reese and Katrina’s navigating the

murky waters of co-mothering. In each instance, characters re-narrativize their own histories,

both in combination and separately, and deterritorialize concepts of pregnancy, family, and

parentage. Minor literature can at once question the political and cultural supremacy of these

metanarratives of time, identity, and labor, and at the same reinscribe them according to

minoritarian standpoint (anti-)epistemology.

Katrina is a divorced cis woman, who through her relationships with Ames (her

employee and the detransitioned man with whom she is pregnant) and Reese (Ames’s ex, and

the proposed co-mother of the unborn child) discovers novel explanatory stories for both her

divorce and previous miscarriage. As to the latter, Katrina describes miscarriage as “biological

loneliness” (173), suggesting that other kinds of loneliness may or may not accompany it, and

perhaps that a relationship with a fetus is strictly biological. Throughout the novel, Reese

narrates the dissonances between her own biology and the desire for a child. She notes that

“biological clock […] isn’t a term that works for me, but still describes something I feel in my

body” (179). Pregnancy is accounted for as neither gift nor burden; it is instead a berth for re-

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accounting, of Katrina’s loneliness and Reese’s boditarian feelings. These feelings are supra-

biological, exceeding hormones and uteruses: Reese suggests that “this might be the most trans

way of me getting pregnant” (44), perhaps the same this that might be the trans solution to the

Sex in the City problem. Reese has deterritorialized pregnancy from the womb to a shared

conception of the horizon: what happens after the baby is born supersedes who grows it inside

them. Still, when Katrina decides she will have an abortion without Ames’s full and singular

commitment (thus breaking the triangle), Reese decides she herself has had a miscarriage, and

is swept up in grief (325). This deterritorialization further decouples pregnancy from “biology,”

challenging conventions of the primacy of the womb in mothering/parentage.1

But as much as the deterritorialization is borne of desire and instinct toward parenting,

a series of political reterritorializations is invoked by Reese’s singular desire to be a mother. As

Katrina works, late in the novel, to disconnect Reese from the parental triad, the reader is given

a specific realm in which the latter may have an upper hand, as “queer experience has instilled

an instinct toward political righteousness as the surest way to win an argument, even between

two individuals” (305-306), though Reese generally steers clear of such tactics. In this first

instance, Reese rails against Katrina’s AIDS-phobia and inconstancy towards their arrangement.

But political righteousness as a weapon manifests at a few moments in the novel, and begs the

question: does Detransition, Baby use this method? Does it make an argument? Does

autotheory meet autofiction if or when a novel displays/narrativizes its tactics? Reese is put in

another, potentially politically discomfiting position when she feels compelled to convince

Katrina not to have the abortion, regarding which the former concludes “A nimble mind can

1 This may be a moment to cite Sophie Lewis, even briefly, on the radical potential of surrogacy.

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always uncover the politics to justify its own selfishness” (335). But what is selfishness to the

minoritarian subject, who under the Master’s dictates is so often considered self-less? Reese’s

“selfishness” manifests as the desire to be a mother overriding a de facto pro-reproductive

rights and self-determination position. Are these the politics of Reese’s child, or the futurity of

The Child? Reese slightly earlier ponders that the “sharing-a-baby enterprise is nothing but an

elaborate exercise in the gentrification of queerness” (306); what did queerness look like before

this gentrification? The simplest answer would be: childless. Reese sounds here almost like a

grown-up Maria Griffiths, citing a queer punk ethos that may bear little resemblance to either

her own or any future reality. Even gentrification is deterritorialized. (((Is it?)))

But mis/carriage is a circuitry reterritorialized as surrogacy or non-biological co-

parenting/mothering. The “nuclear” family and structural metaphors of “stability” and

“foundation” are older, more calcified tropes which admit of a different kind of territory. From

the onset, Ames knows, “with the data he stores in heart: he should not be a father” (14), and

yet the “solution” he hits on is to renew his relationship with Reese as a coparent. He admits

that he misses Reese “in a familial way” (15), a peculiar way of recoding a relationship which

was formative in Amy’s transition and more or less terminated by Ames’s detransition. Family

is, in the Master’s formulation, a metaphor for closeness and an unconquerable rampart for

morality and commitment. Looking at each member of the triangle’s comportment towards

family is instructive in accounting for one category of minoritarian deterritorialization.

Ames, as has been noted, is at once unready or sees himself unfit to be a father, and at

the same time desires a family with Reese. His position in this arrangement is hardly

patriarchal; he at various moments fades into the background as the women get to know each

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other. But while Ames is somewhat muted in the family arrangement, stereotypical of a certain

trope of a “man’s role” in familial structures, the initial proposal is his, and so his re-

narrativization of the unlikelihood of impregnating a woman due to past hormone usage is to

reject being half of a reciprocal and binary parentage. This part of “biological” male-ness

requires an alternative narrative if it is carried through to term. Each of the Reese and Katrina

has her own re-narrativizing gambits as well.

Reese has thought a great deal about motherhood, her two sets of relevant experience

coming from working in daycare and mothering younger trans women. In both cases, these are

“someone else’s” children, but in neither do they seem to threaten to “gentrify queerness.”

Part of the unfulfilled desire of mothering the trans girls may be its own mutedness: “all of the

mothering has been tacit: the girls need it, yearn for it, but won’t accept it if they realize what it

is” (89). Reese reflects that she was Amy’s mother, and concludes that it is only sensible that

Ames looks to her as a mother now. She is perhaps getting her phantom “moment of

comeuppance” (87) that most parents of trans children are denied due to trans sterility, as

Ames has “grown into” a man and now faces his own fatherhood. But the taboos of queer

motherhood and family are equally palpable, as Reese elects not to share with an acquaintance

at the queer beach “anything so square as the child or family that preoccupy her” (323).

Motherhood can be deterritorialized and re-narrativized, but neither of those means

minoritarian community must accept them—they are no less square. The revolutionary

potential here is not an alternative family structure, necessarily, but rather a reinforcement of

the Master’s dominion over family; Ames has not found a loophole in his triangular plan, if

indeed he even sought one. Reese had a brush with her fantasy of a future and a child with

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college boyfriend Sebastian, but it is revealed as an “evil genie’s facsimile of her dream life” (69)

as Sebastian decides “I want a family someday. I don’t think you can give me one” (70). He has

clearly realized there is a possibility that Reese could give him one, but taken his odds that she

will not. This failure to convince Sebastian that she can and wants to give him a family dovetails

with Reese’s having aligned sex-gender with family participation, or, as she puts it, “that feeling

of womanhood placed in a family” (179), a kind of “validation” binarized with its opposition,

“women who never have kids get treated like silly whores” (ibid). Putting aside for the moment

the whorephobia of this statement, Reese has built a reterritorializing circuit that first couples

womanhood with motherhood, then suggests that an absence of motherhood suggests women

lack “some basic capacity to love” (ibid).

One nodular point of friction between Reese’s and Katrina’s experiences of womanhood

is queer temporality, about which Reese wonders how being a mother inflects. Reese notes

“The idea of herself as an adult made other long-delayed considerations possible” (187), an

impression wholly at odds with Katrina’s experiences. Reese’s sense of motherhood is a

deterritorialization of time as well as identity, the idea of her adulthood un-forestalling

becoming a mother. Katrina, on the other hand, has passed certain mile markers of the

Master’s time, including pregnancy, miscarriage, divorce, office affair, and unexpected

pregnancy. By the time the novel picks up with her, Katrina has re-narrativized the divorce

according to its “tone,” “the Ennui of Heterosexuality” (19). It is a pithy sort of apologia of

straightness, but then, the only thing initially queer about her and Ames’s interoffice

relationship is that she is a woman boss and he a man employee. Later, Reese offers Katrina a

much more dynamic reterritorialization when the former avers that “The only people who have

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anything worthwhile to say about gender are divorced cis women who have given up on

heterosexuality but are still attracted to men” (167). This is more than ennui, it is a

deterritorialization of sexual desire from sexuality, and furthermore offers Katrina a kind of

authority she never previously considered. Reese doubles down in suggesting “divorce is a

transition story” (ibid), which, if true, the reader gets as little evidence for as any other

transition story in this minor literature. By the time their her relationship with Reese has

reached a swift maturation, Katrina has fully re-narrativized her divorce as a coming-out story

(294), almost smugly relaying her new family arrangement to her other cis woman friends. But

there are limits, and Katrina may not have the tools (or the will) to deterritorialize family or

parentage completely. She pushes Reese to “maybe instead of saying what the inevitable

outcome is, just make a fucking leap” (232), suggesting a rejection of the phobic public’s

censure of taking flight with the future of The Child. But Katrina ends up fumbling for a railing

when she sees how long the drop is in making this leap; Reese is too reckless for her tastes, and

Ames, even more damningly, too indefinite with his identity. Out of all the hand-wringing

about fatherhood, Ames’s realization deterritorializes the unborn child onto his own identity:

“And finally, there was an answer: He does not want his child to know him as he is” (318). He

has re-narrativized the unworthy or unready father trope into an incomplete (never complete)

transition story. Ames speculates that perhaps the child—the perspective, potential child—

deserves “a parent whose presence was unquestionable, because it was true” (317). A true

presence; is it a consistent one, an unchanging one, a committed one, or one that could not be

otherwise? In any case, Katrina’s queered family cannot include a trans woman who knowingly

sleeps with the seroconverted husband of one of her friends, nor can it rationalize a father who

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is utterly uncertain of the persistence of his place on a gender spectrum, even if Katrina accepts

the spectrum itself. She may “choose” Ames, but only a certain Ames, telling him she needs

“the stability of a partner who can promise that he’s more or less going to be the same person”

(334). This is not simply the sex-gender iteration of Heraclitus’s paradox, it is a mother

anchoring herself to identity under the Master’s logic of “stability” in heteronormative coupling

with Ames and, equally importantly, not Reese.

Passing/(de)transition

As noted above, Detransition, Baby baits the (or perhaps a certain) reader to look for

markers of de/transition narrative. The novel form wants to give motives, speculate on

consequences, set expectations and confirm or disconfirm them. Detransition as a literary

trope, likewise, begs questions of both transition—from what/where to what/where—and

similarly the “why” and “how” of detransition: is it a return to pretransition, or detransitioning

to somewhere/someone/something else altogether? The novel does not, of course, answer

any of these concerns directly. Peters’ characters wind between equivocation, self-conscious

distancing, and incredulity in considering the relationship between transition and detransition,

each of which complicates commitments to sex-gender and passing. For the purposes of this

study, the trap is to read transition as deterritorialization (disavowed in Chapter One) and thus

detransition as reterritorialization. But Ames has more than the memory2 of living and loving as

a trans woman in him, and Reese now seems to date exclusively cis men, making Amy perhaps

2 Deleuze and Guattari write “Becoming is an antimemory—memories always have a reterritorializing function” (TP, 323-324)

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her last romantic or sexual attachment with a trans woman. The neat geometry, the Master’s

account of (de)transition, would be the causation of trauma: past harms lead to gender

transition, more recent ones lead to the self-correction of detransition. Detransition, Baby

perhaps more than any other novel in this range thinks through the boditarian elements of sex-

gender (anti-)identity, but its two main characters comport themselves quite differently before

these elements, a forking path through the thicket of the Master’s dictates and foundational

presumptions. But, crucially, these are not public concerns; Reese’s considerations of passing

and Amy/Ames’s of (de)transition are self-reflexive, deterritorialized from the judgments of the

phobic public sphere. Peters’ novel is an isthmus between Reese shepherding Amy through

becoming, and Ames working through an unbecoming—which is not necessarily to say a return.

Passing is contextual, both for the presumed judges and the judged. When Reese

thinks, “No matter how easily she passed as cis among the cis, passing as cis among other trans

women never happened—they had trained their entire lives to see signs of transness” (38), she

begs the question: why would one want to pass as cis among other trans women? Nothing

regarding sex-gender presentation and embodiment is idly observed in the novel; the title

makes passing observation an impossibility. Reese is good at passing when passing is perhaps

most desired or necessary, when it most heavily inflects back on one’s sense of self-

determination. She continually deterritorializes passing from a set of behaviors and semiotics

designed to convince a more or less phobic pool of cis observers to something personal,

individual—her own metrics of passing. In considering what it means to pass, Reese quips

“Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it

is to always stand in good lighting” (92). As has been noted time and again in minor literature,

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the narration (in this case, internal monologue) sets up an equivalency or hierarchy that is not

immediately apparent as warranted. The pairing of “living in true gender” and “standing in

good lighting” suggests that the latter must be prioritized over, rather than automatically

contributing to, the former. The shared preposition—“in—ought not to be overlooked, either.

One always stands in light or darkness, but not every subject considers how they live in any

gender. To stand in good lighting may be the deeper desire because it reterritorializes true

gender as appearing as one desires. Earlier, Reese ponders ideal body types, pondering the

“pear shape” that she “always not-so-quietly prized as a marker of uncommon passability” (29).

Much the same as good lighting, presumably, displaying this shape is itself all-too-uncommon, a

higher degree of likelihood of passing, one more tally in the column of living in one’s true

gender. Whatever trauma or dysphoria Reese experiences—and these elements of

minoritarian experience will be considered later in this chapter—they have less to do with

passing or becoming, and more to do with being.

Amy and Ames, on the other hand, represent continuous becoming and passing from

quite different vantages. The arc of Amy’s becoming is imbricated with her disidentifying with

sex-gender on a much broader level than feeling certain about a “true gender” for herself. As a

teenager, “anything to do with socially expected sex” would cause gender “flaws to reveal

themselves” (124)—but to whom? The text suggests that these flaws are Amy’s alone, and her

frustrations with transition are not that the flaws fail to be corrected, but are instead boditarian

and communitarian. For the former, Ames notes that “before all this gender shit, [Amy’s] body

was like a good dog. […] When Amy transitioned, she lost her dog. There was just her. She and

her body were one and the same.” (316), which constitutes a disidentification from gender in

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becoming “just her” body. This merging seems almost too much for Amy to handle; the only

playbook she is given for how to move through the world as a trans women comes from Reese,

someone who is in no way uncertain about gender, only frustrated that motherhood leans so

heavily on a biological element of sex-gender that she struggles to deterritorialize. Her

minoritarian frustrations are not shared by Amy.

But this sense of being nothing but one’s body does not necessarily persist, at least not

in the same way. Ames notes in one of his first retrospective considerations of transition, “the

big lesson of transition, of detransition […] delay is a form of hiding from reality” (27). Delay

here can be read as not simply a queer time—the waiting that Muñoz suggests is part and

parcel to Black, Brown, queer, trans, migrant experience—but a forestalling of the Master’s

reality. Amy waits to become, Ames waits to be, but the communitarian impulse remains

throughout. Ames positions detransition as the result of a forced and enforced binary, not

between genders, but between ways of being. He speculates on considering detransition due

to the difficulty of being a trans woman vs ceasing to exist in any meaningful way (31-32).

Ames is defined far more by what he is not than anything he wants to be, as tidy a framing of

minoritarian disidentification as any. The reader of Detransition, Baby is offered a variety of

glimpses of what “existing in a meaningful way” might mean, but certainly no consistent model

or target. The great and established novel can not abide this aperture, it screams for even a

gesture towards resolution. Katrina, as that sort of novel’s representative, feels sufficiently

empowered to ask Ames: “So you got sick of being trans?”, to which Ames rejoins, “I got sick of

living as trans. […] I am trans, but I don’t need to do trans.” (98). Being trans means

communitarian identification, grappling with perpetual, horizonal, anti-teleological becoming.

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Ames embodies Paul B. Preciado’s trans body which is at once an “insurgent institution without

a constitution,” an “epistemological paradox,” and a “future without a teleology” (“My Body

Doesn’t Exist” (67) in Producing Futures, 2017). But living as or doing trans apparently means

passing as trans, embodying a gender other than that assigned at birth, and the reasons for

refusing (or not needing) to persist as such, are also communitarian, as the last year of living as

a woman was “the year in which Ames stopped being so angry with how cis people treated

trans people and [the one in which] he started growing sad and contemplative about how trans

women treat each other” (99). Peters will offer no grander antecedent for detransition than

this, and Ames’s sex-gender embodiment feels almost immaterial when read against the

sadness of the preceding revelation. He continues, pressing the inclusive pronouns, “with our

strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no

elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain” (101). Ames speaks as

representative here, echoing an earlier comment of Reese’s about lacking elders (167), and

suggesting he found no stable group upon transition and now can speak of a mass “we” after

detransition. Amy worried about becoming like William, a detransitioned man who seeks

always after attention from trans women (31), and upon reuniting with Reese, Ames nots: “I

forgot what it’s like being around trans women. That for once, I’m not the only one constantly

analyzing the gender dynamics of every situation to play my role” (31). Having modulated

between (at least) three sex-gender universes, Ames’s sense of roles is piqued. It is not solely

out of ribald wit that Reese responds to Katrina’s account for Ames getting her pregnant and

“dumping a huge transsexual revelation” on her “with almost no time to process” that this

activity is “like the second most popular way to announce one’s current, future, or past

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transsexuality” (163). There is no “most popular way” to announce this to be found in the

novel, and Reese’s offhand joke as she gets more familiar with Katrina is meant simply to

defuse the significance of the revelation, which Reese likely sees as absurd. The “transsexual

revelation” that jars is really like any other: past-tense. The present-tense, gerundial becoming

seems rarely to be the Master’s concern; he is interested in finality and what has become, and

perhaps what can be un-become.

Violence/Trauma

The Master’s politics are those of violence and appeasement; the State’s monopoly on

the former allows it to modulate the latter depending upon circumstance and population. In

Detransition, Baby, there is violence and pain within relationships, and violence looming at the

fringes of minoritarian experience; the former deterritorializes while the latter reterritorializes

who can harm and how. Reese is the conduit, and not simply the receptacle, of violence and

abuse in the novel, theorizing as she does on its role in her sexuality, desire, and community.

She finds it in her sense of sex-gender expression, offering the Pythagorean deduction that

because “Every woman adores a Fascist,” then Reese loves violence as well, “because I am a

woman” (59, author’s emphases). But this love of violence reads as a particular kind of reaction

to the softness of Reese’s relationship with the anodyne Amy, one characterized as more

maternal than erotic. Reese thinks, “Sex at the edge of abuse is banal,” and the abuse to which

Reese seems attracted is outside of the bedroom, distinguishing it from kink or other queer-

adjacent sexual practice. She goes on, “And when it comes to gender, consent makes it all

pretend, which left consensual violence lacking real value in Reese’s tally of gender affirmation”

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(60). It is a hell of a formulation: so long as an economy of consent guides behavior, gender is

imaginary, and thus consensual violence can not only not affirm, but neither can it disaffirm

gender. As addressed above, though, Reese’s gender rarely seems in need of particular

affirmation from amative partners. Instead, she finds the openly violent Stanley, who

emotionally degrades her, offering what Amy (and perhaps any woman, trans or not) could not:

sex-gender affirmation through the Master’s worst-kept and perhaps longest-standing volume

of dictates, patriarchy. And so Ames is entirely justified in being “afraid of [Reese’s] men”

(302), just as Amy was aware, in Stanley, of people “who kept themselves more ready and

prepared for violence than Amy herself could ever tolerate” (253). Reese has deterritorialized

partner violence, and at the same time deterritorialized the threat of pregnancy onto that of

HIV infection, putting up with her seroconverted “cowboy” because “with him, she’d

discovered sex that was really and truly dangerous” (7) in the way that it is for people with

uteruses every time. He does not to be physically violent with Reese, because the cowboy

possesses the ability to permanently impact her life with each unprotected encounter. It is

thusly that Reese develops an entire narrative of HIV infection as pregnancy, and PrEP as birth

control (8). Violence and abuse, pregnancy and AIDS—these minoritarian circuits of

de/reterritorialization remap “justifiable” harm and the medico-ethical phobic public spheres.

When the latter reaches Katrina, she is overwhelmed with AIDS panic, seeking immediately to

cut Reese out of the parental triangle under the Master’s category of responsibility deficiency.

Upon hearing this from Ames, Reese can only comment, “How retro” (304). The violence of

AIDS shatters Katrina’s utopic queerness, sucks the air out of her coming out narratives and the

idea of anything other than a nuclear, heteronormative two-parent family.

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And yet, Reese, Amy, and Ames each has their own sense of the latent violence and

trauma of being trans. The strategies of inuring oneself to violence by either inviting it into a

relationship or insulating oneself within a community of peers each has its merits, but neither

obviates the phobic public spheres and the damage they’ll easily, sometimes even inadvertently

wreak on the minoritarian subject. So pain and death become specific territories of identity

and standpoint (anti-)epistemology. Reese wonders, “Without legible traumas to point to,

what would pain make her?” (152), which sounds like an echo of Riki Ann Wilchins’ essay “A

New Vagina Didn’t Make Her Sad (It Didn’t Have To).”3 Reese knows the answer, at least the

Master’s answer: pain will not make her anything she was not already, because any pain she

feels as a result of her subject position is the result of dysphoria, a biographical border she can

choose to ignore, but one which will be no less real for it. Even the legible traumas to which

she refers will read quite differently to different publics. It is operating under a similar logic

that Reese decides, regarding Amy’s detransition: “That is not gender, Reese’s guilt would

argue, that is pain. All pain merits care, but not dogmatically egalitarian relativism” (228). Ah,

relativism, one of the Master’s great codes for unempirical, unprovable, individual, irrelevant.

For Reese, gender is allowed to be pain; for detransitioning Amy, the two are distinguished

because Ames will have turned his back on his subject position and his community, and, by

small extension, her. Reese becomes not the arbiter of sex-gender identity, but the codex of

what is allowed to be painful.

At the community level, the threat of violence is more often reactive and retrospective,

latent in the sense of quotidian death. Reese muses on the connection of death and religion for

3 TSQ (V7, no3, 2020)

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her community: “If you are a trans girl who knows many other trans girls, you go to church a

lot, because church is where they hold they funerals” (209). The phrasing here inserts an

additional level of remove; Reese could say “if you are a trans girl, you know a lot of people

who die,” or even, “if you are a trans girl, you go to a lot of funerals.” But instead, the church is

inserted as a location in which one often finds themselves, and the reason is the routine nature

of (young, woman/femme/nonbinary) death in minoritarian community. Reese is a bit more

acerbic regarding the proceedings themselves, describing the ubiquity of someone reminding

attendees that we must “do more to save trans women of color, who are being murdered,”

though this “funeral is, of course, a suicide because that’s how the white girls die prematurely”

(ibid). Interestingly, in the minor literature under consideration, Sophie’s suicide in Little Fish is

worthy of remark in its unique centrality to the plot. Other than that, only Hazel Jane Plante

speculates about suicide more broadly, towards the end of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian),

to note that, though Vivian did not herself die that way, that trans folks are worth remembering

in death for more than the way they perished. Plante invents (as far as I can tell) a poem

written out of communitarian care, “To My Trans Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide”

by Elba Congreve (LB, 181-182), suggesting that though suicide was not the culprit here, it

looms in a particular way. As such, it is unsurprising that bystanders (mis)interpret Reese’s

walking into the depths off Riis Beach as a cliché of trans woman suicide. It is worth mentioning

that Amy recognizes her own part in the narrative of anti-trans violence far earlier, when she

confronts Reese about the latter’s infidelity, knowing the abovementioned Stanley will wield

violence with gleeful impunity. Amy thinks “Let’s feed the nostalgia of these fucks. McCarren

Park like it was two decades ago, with some real edge again. Transsexuals getting called

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faggots and stomped” (255). Nostalgia in Detransition, Baby is a memorial to violence,

memories of open trans bashing, AIDS moral panic, and moments of reprisal against gender

flaws.

Whore/sex worker

None of Detransition, Baby’s four main characters (accounting for the central and

distinct roles Amy and Ames play in the narrative) identifies as a sex worker, nor does the novel

offer evidence that they have ever taken part in the trades. Yet sex work takes on a particular

role in the vernacular of the novel, offering equal parts whorephobia/stigma and the quotidian,

prosaic nature of the work for many in and around her minoritarian communities. Interestingly,

the distinction cuts along a specific usage of terms: “whore” tends to be deployed

metaphorically or figuratively, designating a denigrated, polluted subject position as it might in

the parlance of phobic public spheres of medicine, feminism, or family. The “prostitute” or “sex

worker,” on the other hand, represents just another laborer, or a co-conspirator or ally. The

circuitry of deterritorialization in the novel is such that one can be a sex worker and not a

whore, and vice versa; there is no sense of reclamation of the subject position of sex worker,

nor any direct violence visited upon a sex working person. And yet, whorephobia bubbles up in

ways rendered only more marked by the infrequency of reference.

Sex worker persists as an option in Reese’s offhand “transsexual” triangle of jobs:

“computer programmer, aesthetician, or prostitute” (54), putting criminalized labor on a plane

with a trade which requires one sort of training and tech work which requires another.

Furthermore, Reese is comfortable contextualizing some of her own experiences against the

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backdrop of the sex trades, noting her “familiarity with informal sex work” (284). Informal

could be read a number of ways, as the relative formality of any version of criminalized labor

could be debated. But at the very least, the modifier reflects a sense of the spectrum of trading

sex, and perhaps of the different shapes that labor can take. Reese compares her own best

working days to sex work: noting that she could ask as much for babysitting on Valentine’s Day

“as her friends who worked as escorts could request from their regulars” (185). The parallels of

gendered, emotional labor are obvious, as is the reality of a hackneyed hetero/homonormative

Hallmark holiday in inflating asking prices. Reese recognizes sex work as the secondary

economy perhaps nearest to her community in Brooklyn, and quips about seeing trans

actresses who a year ago “were only surviving selling weed or turning the occasional trick”

(168), again putting sex work on a specific plane of criminalized, survival-based labor available

to trans women in particular. These trans actresses occupy a specific reterritorialized subject

position, a space which will never ascend to the level of the trans girl career triangle, but

represents one special case in Reese’s community. Where they were “only surviving” with sex

work and money from drugs, these women have carved out space as representatives and

perhaps exemplars of a certain acceptable (trans) femininity in phobic public spheres.

Amy has one, relatively swift circuit of deterritorializing and reterritorializing sex work as

had Amy “not lost, sometime in the last year, the ability to tell Reese exactly what she wanted

in bed, she wouldn’t have had to tell the dommes” (DB, 244). As it happens, the succession of

pro-dommes becomes necessary because Amy and Reese’s sex life has become “more work to

affirm Reese’s gender” (ibid) than attending to Amy’s needs. The first domme is, Amy assumes,

actually an Indian man at a call center, masking his voice and perhaps exercising his own

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fantasies of being a domme. This level of remove is too much, so Amy turns to highly-trained

domme who employs multiple specialized techniques in her practice, an “approach a little too

therapeutic” for Amy’s needs (DB, 245). The significance here is these are all dommes, not

“prostitutes” and certainly not “whores.” Finally, Amy’s goldilocks experience with sex workers

ends with a domme who mixes light S&M with mothering, and both worker and client are

(briefly) satisfied. But when the worker decides to drop the price by 75% as she enjoys the

sessions so much, Amy “found herself shy” (DB, 247). It is the transactionality which excites

her, and when the labor become un/under-waged, Amy de-instrumentalizes why she sought

out sex workers to begin with. She turns her shyness into a political abnegation, wondering

“what kind of fucked-up trans-misogyny or late-capitalist angst or trauma had colonized her?”

(247). The choice of terms here again plays to a certain contemporary political vernacular, one

perhaps more minority than minoritarian. What is it that is trans-misogynistic about seeking

(and finding!) professional help for a particular issue? Is the transactionality of it shameful, or

anti-feminist? Furthermore, the choice of either late-capitalist angst (perhaps something like

consumerist therapy) or trauma is all too typical of the Master’s discourses regarding sex work.

The only trauma Amy seems to be experiencing is that of losing her partner to a violent,

misogynistic man, as she self-pityingly thinks “No wonder Reese went back to Stanley” (ibid).

But before turning to Stanley’s role in how Detransition, Baby thinks sex work, it is

worth turning to the one member of Reese’s immediate minoritarian community who is a sex

worker. Reese lives with Iris for the “contemporary” chapters of the novel, and their friendship

outside of the triangle is one of few represented in the work. Iris is reflective of Reese’s

preference for “prostitute” out of the “transsexual jobs” available, as it’s the one that has “a

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good sense of humor” (54). For her part, Iris describes being “owned” by abusive men, of her

own volition, and blurs the line between her sex work and her own sense of sexual desire.

Reese is jealous of these descriptions, displacing her own desire for abusive men as amateurish

in comparison to Iris’s work and life. But Iris’s in-call space in their shared apartment clearly

delineates the “part-time erotic massage parlor” (216) from the room where she sleeps. Reese

understands the delineation clearly as well, noting to another friend that she lives “in a

professional massage parlor, thank you very much” (217, author’s emphasis), as Iris gets paid

for her work there, and thus the entire apartment becomes professionalized. This designation

is important, as Reese simply and persistently cannot account for sex work—informal or

otherwise—in her own life. And so Iris the professional is at once a reservoir of stories and

categories of bad men, and at the same time acerbic and witty regarding her work. She “can’t

stand a hooker with a financial advisor” (221, author’s emphasis), a note regarding both class

position and the reality that people in her subject position—drug-using, sex-working, young

trans woman in the city—tend not to have or need financial advisors. But in the most telling

disidentificatory moment, considering her disbelief at Ames’s detransition, Reese notes the

ways in which masculinity had become an insulating, numbing tool with which Amy could hide

herself. Reese further compares this tool to Iris’s ability to dissociate, a “superpower that let

her succeed lucratively and heroically” (228) in her work. The modifiers here are telling, as

Reese deterritorializes coping onto professional skill: “lucratively” somehow implies that Iris

makes more money because she is able to dissociate. At best, this nods to phobic public

assumptions that sex workers are abused, have traumatic pasts that led them to their line of

work, and otherwise need rescuing from it. But “heroically” as a rehabilitative adverb is an

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entirely different sort of supplement. It must not simply mean making lots of money, because

lucrative covers that. Rather, Iris becomes a model of a successful sex worker in Reese’s eyes

because she is so apparently easily able to dissociate, whereas Amy’s dissociation into

masculinity is tragic. In the end, this deterritorialization is impossible, as Reese “didn’t believe

in that spin; she could never quite complete the dogmatically radical leap that would transform

dissociation from coping mechanism to superpower” (228). Of course, no one asked her to! It

is entirely unclear who is “spinning” this explanation, and even less so what would render it

either dogmatic or radical. Reese once again deploys the language of leftist organizing and

theory to shield her own disidentification. Whether or not she herself dissociates from

femininity or sex work, she builds minoritarian community with those who participate in both.

Regardless of this refusal, Reese’s relationship with Stanley could absolutely be read as

one of sugaring. Stanley has little need to rationalize this relationship as something other than

sex work, not unlike protagonists’ more or less formal sex working arrangements in Peters’

earlier novellas. At their first date, Stanley tells Reese that he doesn’t mind paying for sex, and

accounts for their dinner as such. The problem with simply hiring workers directly is that all

trans escorts “want vaginas” (51), something which would remove them from Stanley’s objects

of desire. Nonetheless, the transactionality and certainty of Stanley’s economic authority is an

advantage: “one thing I liked about those trans escorts was how easily I bought them” (53). For

Stanley, sex work seems like a relationship of domination, but in fact, the appeal of the

informality of transacting sex with Reese is that the domination is more complete. He tells

Reese, without irony or humor, “the only politically acceptable way to subjugate women is

financially” (53). The reasons for Stanley’s concern with political acceptability remains an open

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question; he is as pronounced a mouthpiece for the Master’s purchase on misogyny as possible.

Reese eventually employs a sex working context for her later reconnection with Stanley, as she

recalls “Iris was always telling stories about her pseudo-johns” (195). But Stanley is more than

a pseudo-john, he is a vehicle for Reese to perform a certain variety of internalized

whorephobia. Besides the dinner and cab fare the same night, Reese accepts Stanley’s large

Amazon gift certificate to buy yoga pants, as instructed. For whatever reason, she sends him

the receipt, to which he replies “I didn’t even have to work to make you into a whore” (55,

author’s emphasis), suggesting she was not one the previous night, but now is, though there

has been no sexual contact. Still, she has been compensated for time with someone who

assumes she finds him distasteful and would not have been there without payment. This

whoredom of Reese’s takes a few different forms, but the term is most often used in self-

reference coupled with a capitalist metaphor.

Reese refers to herself as a “brand whore” (276) as she finds designer baby shoes and

Katrina scan items into a baby registry, using “whore” as a metaphor for her aspirational

capitalist desire. She realizes the absurdity of the purchase, and so relents and suppresses the

whorish impulse. With Stanley, Reese “liked how he called her a whore, then bought her

expensive gifts” (48). The gifts themselves would be incomplete without the defamatory

epithet, whore denoting polluted subject position while being somewhat descriptive of their

arrangement. But when Reese again refers to herself as “brand whore” (59) again, it is in

reference to her subverting Stanley’s gift of designer boots that he knew she would hate (58).

Reese exchanges them for cheap knock-offs, and Stanley realizes his “politically acceptable”

subjugation has failed. The result is another of the Master’s modes of domination, physical

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violence, and Stanley slaps Reese with enough force to draw blood. Prostitutes have good

senses of humor, whores are subject to being struck by bad men.

But perhaps the closest Reese gets to identifying with whoredom is in her identification

with a cultural artifact, the 1967 Luis Buñuel film Belle de Jour. Catherine Deneuve’s Severine

Serizy is a sexually-repressed housewife who, perhaps like Reese, fantasizes about S&M and

violently transgressive sex. In her becoming the titular Belle, Séverine uses sex work as a means

of acting out her fantasies and sexual desires, somewhat a Master trope of the sexual guerilla, a

specific manner of accounting for sex work which often serves SWERF ends.4 Reese recognizes

“her own sexuality” in Belle’s “secret desire to be mistreated and abused as a whore” (60). Yet

again, sex work is deterritorialized as a quotidian, perhaps occasionally heroic, means of

survival work for the trans community around Reese, and reterritorialized as the debased,

polluted, forbidden subject position of “whore.” Whores get beaten because they want or

deserve it, are childless and silly, or enslaved to their brand desires; they represent a subject

position evacuated of political potential or communitarian solidarity; whores are a metaphor.

In her final frustration at Katrina’s AIDS panic, Reese invokes the language of whorephobia,

reappropriated onto her own subject position: “transgender is the name selected to recognize a

vector of disease” (307). Somehow, though, she cannot recognized that whore is another of

those names.

4 Referred to in Mac and Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes as the Erotic Professional, a stand-in for sex work that is only acceptable if the worker is enthusiastic about the liberatory potential of sex work, and the domination over men which it represents for women. This narrow view serves SWERF ends in that it positions the Erotic Professional against the fallen woman/whore, a heavily class-dependent, racialized, anti-migrant distinction.

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(Mis)recognition/dissociation

To the Master, all (mis)recognition is dissociation and delusion, straying from the

ultimately linear trajectory of identity-formation. There is no room in majoritarian

epistemology for producing knowledge through (mis) anything, save perhaps by negative

comparison. Even aporetics assumes that there is some consistency, some bedrock, against

which inconsistency, insolubility, and paradox can be judged. Katrina seems destined to

become Detransition, Baby’s reservoir of phobic publics, when her office romance first

threatens her sense of corporate feminist equality. She tells Ames, regarding the dynamics of

their employee-boss relationship, “If the genders were reversed […] I’d be appalled” (24).

Reversal is binary, yes, but it is also orthogonally directional. Ames seemed to be moving

forward, as a man, but it turns out he has reversed course, from being a woman, and upon this

revelation Katrina is “Deceived!” (27). It is Ames’s success at passing rather than his being

discovered to have failed—he has been too successful at passing as an AMAB cis man! In any

case, past sex-gender identities are apparently public/private record within the presumed

openness of a sexual amative relationship, and Katrina realizes her own failure to recognize—

absurd as that is to note—Ames’s past. What follows is a circuitry of (mis)recognition in various

assemblages of the four (again, accounting for the separation of Amy and Ames in the

narrative, itself a kind of (mis)recognitive tactic) central characters of the narrative.

It is Katrina’s always-potential queerness which acts as a (mis)recognitional hinge

between her and Reese. The latter wonders of the former “Is she queer at all, this

woman?”(41), rendering the designation a matter of degree rather than all-or-nothing,

hetero/homosexual. Reese’s recognition of Katrina as part of a decidedly queered family unit

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requires a definitive answer to this query. Later, the term “heteronormativity” entering

Katrina’s vernacular becomes what “allowed” Reese to communicate with Katrina’s mother

regarding the idea of co-parenting. If Katrina’s own mother can comprehend their arrangement

as non-heteronormative, then they share some sort of territory from which to approach

Reese’s participation. But for Katrina, “heteronormativity” has a greater gravity in her own re-

narrativizing divorce, miscarriage, pregnancy, and, finally, sharing parentage, as Reese

recognizes: “Katrina is coming out as queer to her friends” (293). This (mis)recognition incites

Reese to view Katrina’s being “excited not to do the heteronormative thing” as Katrina thinks

“queerness makes her interesting!” (ibid). Reese’s skepticism or outright cynicism regarding

many assumptions regarding queerness and trans identity is pervasive, and more than

questioning whether queerness does in fact make Katrina interesting—it was Reese, after all,

who wondered if Katrina was at all queer—she casts doubt on whether it is of any

consequence. Reese is in fact paranoid at the potential for Katrina’s utopic “fantasies that

queerness would save her” (266), wondering what this suggests at her own entanglement with

this woman. Nonetheless, Reese (mis)recognizes her “mom-crush” on Katrina. The question of

the two women’s shared territory (or lack thereof), and how they ought to comport themselves

towards one another is classic, Austenian fiction of manners.

Reese and Katrina also hit on a (mis)recognitive node around race/migrancy and

gender/transness. Paul B Preciado (2019) offers a useful formulation for this potential juncture

in experience under the Master’s state: “legally speaking,” the trans person is an exile from

assigned at birth gender, and seeks “to be recognized as a potential citizen of another gender

(or nation-state)” (58). Preciado continues with this analog, describing the trans subject as

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“apatride,” just like the migrant and the refugee; each experiences “the temporary suspension

of their political status,” and occupies “a position of high social vulnerability” (ibid). Ames

struggles to find the language to respond to Katrina’s description of her husband’s secret Asian

fetishization, confirmed by his hidden porn collection. Ames’s experiences with “tranny

chasers” (DB, 22) give his empathy some weight, but he has not yet come out to Katrina, and

thus lacks the proper pathos to comfort her. His social vulnerability is inhered in not revealing

his detransitioned status, of disidentifying with transness to continue his heteronormative

coupling. When Reese and Katrina debate the idea of motherhood as a right or a privilege, one

which is highly racialized and class-based at that, Reese is flummoxed by the supremacy of her

own priority to victimhood being called into question. It is a startling moment of

(mis)recognition; her deployment of political subject position as trump card has been denuded

by someone undoubtedly occupying a higher class status, but perhaps a lateral status as mixed

race woman. Reese thinks, “apparently, no one has informed Katrina that among queers, trans

women were still a subaltern du jour” (177)—but then, how often is Katrina among queers?

Her own subaltern status is in a different venue, one which included divorces and porn fetishes

which span an entire continent, of which she becomes the representative object of desire. For

Reese, though, this realization is more than “walking in someone else’s shoes,” it is an element

of her identity-formation which has been more or less unquestioned.

Reese’s trans art of failure is in some ways an internalization of the Master’s

presumptions for how trans women can or ought to act. Cutting between sex-gender

expression/identification and self-determination/disidentity is not a cleaving which has perhaps

been required of Reese to this point. Her friend Ingrid tells her that she is “the only trans girl in

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this city whose incessant drama has almost nothing to do with the fact that she’s trans. Her

drama is just what she makes for herself as a woman” (118). Reese generates drama as part of

her womanhood, and Ingrid identifies this as uniquely and specifically constituted by Reese’s

sex-gender rather than her trans (dis)identity. Her (mis)recognition of her own “failure” is

drawn into sharper relief by the initial breakup with Amy, forcing Reese to conclude that she

“had simply confused failure with being a transsexual” (158). This (mis)recognition is “a

mistake many of the transsexuals she knew made,” and whereas previous “quips” about failure

were designed to make “her sound urbane and worldly,” perhaps “actual failure had turned her

unlovely.” It’s a tough pill, as Reese makes unlovely sound like the worst thing she could

possibly be. For minor literature, though, the important element is the slippage between what

at first reads like a false equivalence: how could someone mistake failure for being trans?

One venue for this question unique to this novel is detransition, itself arguably another

variety of trans. “Arguably” in a literal sense, as there is a standing “fierce debate” between

Thalia, Iris, and Reese regarding if detransition counts “the same as transition in terms of the

respect it has to be given” (227). The Master loves debates, lives for them, and the fact that

there are different answers to the question among three trans women is itself a minor victory

for phobic publics. Iris maintains that equal respect absolutely should be given, Thalia agrees,

though thinks neither is particularly worthy of any “respect,” perhaps recognizing that the

economy of respectability is a trap of its own. Reese agrees with equality “in the abstract,” but

after relatively little consideration realizes she “doesn’t respect Ames’s current gender at all,” in

no small part because “masculinity had always been what allowed Amy not to feel” (227). This

minoritarian splitting of character is not the one a majoritarian reader expects—between man

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and woman, cis and trans, or even Master and self. It is indeed a matter of self, all of the

different disidentificatory, deterritorialized ways one can discover self, but the opposition is

other members of minoritarian community. The communitarian value of (dis)identity is

expressed is the disjuncture between self- and comrade, and Detransition, Baby repeatedly

stages this disjuncture between Reese and Amy, Reese and Ames, and even Ames and Amy, the

most distinct and fully-developed pre- and post-(de)transition character(s) in any of the trans

minor literature examined thus far.

Reese wears Amy’s dress, one “poisoned” by Amy’s own “male gaze.” No matter how

often Amy is complimented wearing the dress, “her very joy in it made her feel like a man,”

whereas Reese “appeared to wear it psychically unencumbered” (250). The psychical

encumbrance is one of self-(mis)recognition, paradoxically played out in observing another. In

another instance, Reese is skeptical of Amy’s assurances that they can continue their

relationship after Reese’s first infidelity with Stanley. Though she concedes Amy is believable,

“she and the person making these assurances didn’t quite seem to be one and the same” (258).

Reese’s failure is to see how her attraction to Stanley is both source and symptom of Amy’s

distance, the difference between her two lovers an unbridgeable gulf. Ames has a similar

(mis)recognition in Reese’s bedroom, in which the coral bedspread is “very girly, and it

depresses” him (300). This is a rare parallel moment between Amy and Ames’s experiences of

Reese’s sex-gender, though one which bears no particular self-reflection for Ames. Still, it is in

Amy and Ames, both separately and as a unit, that (mis)recognition is most palpable in

Detransition, Baby. These last citations and instances display the full machinery of trans minor

literature’s self-theorizing and (anti-)epistemology through (mis)recognitive experience and

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gesture. Perhaps the most enduring of trans minor literature’s deterritorializations is its staging

of (mis)recognition.

Peters invents a specific phobia in the novel which thematizes Reese’s relationship to

Ames’s detransition. She notes early on her rule to avoid “crypto-trans women” chasers, those

“who want to be women but are too closeted to handle it, and so they live their fantasies

through you”; the crypto-trans “has to evacuate you, your personhood, to use you” (50). Early

in their relationship, Reese (mis)recognizes crypto-trans in Amy’s past, suggesting that the

latter learned to have sex like a chaser (129). The choice of “crypto-” is a telling one, as Reese

can only understand these chasers in terms of their proximity to trans, never revealing the

telltale signs, but describing the behaviors themselves in chilling, psychical vampiric detail. But

Amy’s history is dotted with (mis)recognition, and the reader is given a momentary glimpse into

her sexual history, begging to be measured up as crypto-trans or not.

The only sexual encounter of Amy’s (not yet Amy, of course) prior to meeting Reese to

which the reader is given entrée is in high school, with the slightly older Delia. In her first,

fumbling attempts, Amy is struck by her first dissociative (mis)recognition: again, before she has

chosen Amy as a moniker, she thinks “Delia liked what Amy liked” (128). But when the sex

itself becomes “good,” it is because Amy has fully disidentified with any sense of man-ness or

masculinity. And it works, as “Wherever she had gone, Delia hadn’t noticed” (ibid). This

becomes part of Amy’s broader dissociative stratagem, one which is based in part upon a

(mis)recognition that the novel refuses to resolve: is Amy more fully realized as Amy or Ames?

Amy’s ability to dissociate by strategic (mis)recognition remains her superpower, and

perhaps endures as Ames. Amy is adept at “managing her own impression of herself as she’s

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fucked” (121), a particular circuitry of self-(mis)recognition that the narrative suggests winds in

on itself endlessly, a mobius strip of (anti-)identity never to be resolved. When Amy is snapped

out of it by Reese’s having an affair with a cis man, detransitioning is hardly a solution, it is

rather a deterritorializing embrace. Amy is glad that Reese is so effusively sorrowful after

Stanley has attacked Amy in McCarren Park. But though she experiences “something like

gladness,” Amy “watched it all from across some new distance” (257). Rather than going to

work in high femme cladding, Amy sense the emergence of “an angry man” (258), not

necessarily the result of some sex-gender epiphany, but the completion of the dissociative

circuit. The (mis)recognition is robust, Amy “had, of course, long come to understand that

masculinity dulled her,” which is a comprehensible palliative, but further “that it dissociated her

from herself” (ibid). Masculinity becomes a codeword for splicing not just Ames from Amy, but

communitarian identification which is the source of pain. Amy seeks “a pocket of space to

separate herself from the bright emotions of shame and fear,” and thus stops taking hormones

and t-blockers, becoming Ames. When “Reese left her shortly after,” it is equally that Amy has

attempted to leave her minoritarian subject position, and Ames has left Amy.

(Mis)recognition may be the legacy of trans minor literature, inciting standpoint

epistemology in the face of a Master who seeks to unify standpoint as irrelevant to knowledge

production. The deterritorializing potential of long form fiction is renewed in a body of

literature which refuses measuring of proof and deference to a genealogy that does not include

its subjects.

310

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